Preamble

The House met at half-past Two o'clock

PRAYERS

[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]

PRIVATE BUSINESS

FLINTSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL (HIGHER FERRY SALTNEY FOOTBRIDGE) BILL

Lords Amendments considered and agreed to.

ABERDARE MARKETS AND TOWN HALL COMPANY BILL [Lords]

Read the Third time and passed, with an Amendment.

DEVON COUNTY COUNCIL BILL [Lords]

As amended, considered; to be read the Third time.

POOLE CORPORATION BILL [Lords]

As amended, considered; to be read the Thira time.

SAINT LAURENCE, CATFORD BILL [Lords]

As amended, considered; to be read the Third time.

CRUDE OIL TERMINALS (HUMBER) BILL [Lords]

As amended, considered; to be read the Third time.

CONWAY CORPORATION BILL [Lords]

Read a Second time and committed.

Oral Answers to Questions — ELECTRICITY

New Power Stations (Building Labour)

Mr. Alison: asked the Minister of Power whether he will issue a general direction, in the public interest, to the Central Electricity Generating Board, requiring that labour employed by its contractors for new power stations be recruited from areas where unemployment levels are above the national average.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Power (Mr. John Morris): No, Sir.

Mr. Alison: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that this is a very surprising and disappointing Answer? To eschew any sort of direction to the C.E.G.B. in this context is inimical to sound planning. Will he not undertake, when his Ministry is responsible for such huge volumes of national expenditure, that it should exercise some supervision as to how it is deployed regionally and locally?

Mr. Morris: There would be severe practical difficulties in the Board attempting to control where its contractors recruited labour. Such control is not normally exercised by other industries. For the major projects the Board's contractors usually find it necessary to recruit labour from other districts so limiting the effect on the locality concerned.

Power Station, River Ouse (Water Requirements)

Mr. Alison: asked the Minister of Power how much water it is proposed to extract from the River Ouse when the projected Drax power station is in operation; and how much of this water will be returned.

Mr. John Morris: A 3,000 megawatts station operating at full load would require up to 62 million gallons of water a day, of which 40 million gallons would be returned. If the capacity of the station is increased to 4,000 megawatts the figures would be 84 and 54 million respectively.

Mr. Alison: While thanking the hon. Gentleman for that Answer, may I ask whether he is aware that this represents a very considerable dip into the Ouse locally, and can he assure us that his right hon. Friend the Minister has had consultations particularly with the local shipbuilding firm in regard to the effect that this will have on its launchings, and, if not, will he undertake to do so?

Mr. Morris: I am not aware of that aspect of the problem raised by the hon. Gentleman. I will certainly look at it, but I understand that the river authorities are concerned about siltation which may be caused by the extraction of water, and the terms of an indemnity to be given by the Board have already been agreed for a 3,000 megawatts station. The extension of this for a 4,000 megawatts station is under consideration. Perhaps that meets some of the aspects raised by the hon. Gentleman.

North Devon (New Power Station)

Mr. Peter Mills: asked the Minister of Power what proposals have now been put to him by the Central Electricity Generating Board for sanctioning its new hydraulic power station at Bucks Mill, North Devon.

Mr. John Morris: None, Sir.

Mr. Mills: Will the Minister bear in mind that that is a very disappointing Answer? We are looking forward to this project very much in North Devon. When it does come down there, as I hope it will, will he pay particular attention to the disposal of the waste product from this project, and instead of dumping it into the sea consider using it to make a permanent breakwater for that coast, which will be a tremendous benefit for the district?

Mr. Morris: On the first part of the supplementary question, what I intended to say was that no proposals had been made. The C.E.G.B. announced in July, 1964, that it was carrying out exploratory surveys at two sites. The Board's investigations are continuing but it is not ready to put forward any proposals. As for the second part of the supplementary question, I understand that the hon. Gentleman has been discussing this matter with the Board and also that there are real technical difficulties arising from the suggestion

put before the House just now, first relating to cost and, secondly, because the excavated material may be too small without some concrete buttressing or protection to do the work he indicates. I have told him that no decision has been made on this matter.

Mr. Scott-Hopkins: When is this to be expected? It is an important matter for the West Country. It has been dragging on for so long and we should like to know when it will be decided.

Mr. Morris: I have nothing to add to what I said earlier, namely, that the Board's investigations are continuing. This announcement was made as late as July, 1964.

Dungeness B Power Station

Mr. Costain: asked the Minister of Power (1) what is his estimate of the number of building, civil engineering and allied service operatives required for the construction of the second nuclear power station, Dungeness B;
(2) what is his estimate of the number of additional personnel required to operate the second nuclear power station. Dungeness B.

Mr. John Morris: I am asking the Chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board to write to the hon. Member.

Mr. Costain: As this Question has been on the Order Paper for some time, does not the hon. Member agree that it would have been possible for a letter to have been written before the Question was asked? What consultations is he having with his colleague, the Minister of Education, about school facilities for the children of employees in this power station?

Mr. Morris: I would have thought that it would have been a matter of courtesy to the House to answer the hon. Member's Question first of all. As for the second part of his supplementary question, that is not a matter for my right hon. Friend.

Mr. Scott-Hopkins: Is the Minister aware that he has not answered my hon. Friend's Question at all? Does he not think that this House has a right to know what the answer is? Surely it is a shocking way to behave to get the Board to


write to my hon. Friend and not to answer today. Is it that he cannot find out, or is he too darned incompetent to do so?

Mr. Morris: The hon. Member is responsible for his own choice of words. Having regard to the fact that he also has held office I would have thought that he would know how far a Minister's responsibility goes for the details of the day-to-day running of a nationalised industry. Having regard to his responsibility for his own words, I have nothing else to add.

Mr. Mitchell: asked the Minister of Power what further economies would follow if a second order were placed for the winning design tendered for the nuclear power station at Dungeness B.

The Minister of Power (Mr. Frederick Lee): A number of factors, such as its siting, would affect the costs of a second station and an estimate would be very speculative, although I expect that there would be economies.

Mr. Mitchell: I think that the Minister has slightly misunderstood what information I am seeking. I understand that by using the same design twice there are major economies. Some reports have said that the economies may be as much as 10 per cent. If so, is the Minister considering changing the existing practice of commissioning one offer for each design and having a major run on the break-through design—which seems to be much more competitive?

Mr. Lee: The hon. Member is right in that a repeat order for a Dungeness B type of power station could be expected to realise economies. For example, the design cost would be spread over more than one station. Probably there would also be manufacturing economies. The cost of the second station cannot be known until tenders have been invited and received. The Board has as yet not put forward any proposals for a nuclear station to follow Dungeness B.

Sir H. Legge-Bourke: Surely the right hon. Gentleman recognises that if we could get a standard gas-cooled reactor of 600 megawatts and this became an exportable product as well, not only should we improve our own power supply but we should also build up a very promising export market in this way?

Will he, therefore, as soon as possible, in co-operation with the Atomic Energy Authority and the Minister of Technology, come to some agreed settlement about this so that everyone knows where they stand?

Mr. Lee: I do not disagree with what the hon. Member says. As yet the Board is still engaged in its pre-contract negotiations and until these are concluded I have nothing to add.

Mr. Wingfield Digby: When will the House get details of the successful tender? They do not seem to be forthcoming from any other source, as the Minister forecast in his original statement. Many of us want to see them, so that we can reach an informed judgment.

Mr. Lee: I have been making inquiries on that point and I think that the hon. Member will find that far more detail will be given at the end of this month.

Pylons

The Earl of Dalkeith: asked the Minister of Power what experiments are being carried out into the camouflaging of electricity pylons with a view to lessening their adverse effect upon the beauty of the countryside; and if he will make a statement on his conclusions on the results that are so far available to him.

Mr. John Morris: Experiments with camouflage painting in 1960 led to the conclusion that, for the majority of conditions, the natural grey of weathered galvanised steel rendered towers least noticeable.

The Earl of Dalkeith: Is the Parliamentary Secretary aware that as fast as we build up the tourist industry and increase the amount of overseas and foreign exchange revenue derived therefrom the electricity boards are doing their utmost to spoil the look of the countryside which the tourists come here to see? Will he consider this as a matter of some urgency and, if necessary, appoint a special amenity committee to look into the matter and advise him on how to site pylons and how to disguise them in future?

Mr. Morris: I am sure that the noble Lord appreciates the importance of taking


electricity to every part of the country. As to looking at the matter closely, certain experiments were carried out by the Central Electricity Generating Board as far back as 1960, when it had the assistance of the war-time Chief Development Officer of the Army School of Camouflage. Various colours and combinations of colours were tried, but in the changing conditions none was successful in merging towers into their backgrounds. The Council for the Preservation of Rural England reached the same conclusion as the Central Electricity Generating Board—that weathered grey or galvanised steel were the best to use.

Mr. Wainwright: Would my hon. Friend agree that the cost involved in this work should be the responsibility of the Government, in view of the considerable expenditure involved in activities of this kind? When deciding these issues, will he remember that for many years private enterprise left huge mountains of derelict refuse throughout the country and did not spend a penny on clearing it up? Since the National Coal Board and the Central Electricity Generating Board are spending a considerable amount of money to prevent the countryside from being spoilt, will my hon. Friend make representations to his right hon. Friends in other Ministries and persuade them to bear some of this cost?

Mr. Ridley: Is the Parliamentary Secretary aware that there is great concern about the amenity aspect of pylons? Everyone recognises that they are necessary, but is he satisfied with the design of pylons from the aesthetic point of view and would it not be advantageous if further thought were given to improving their design?

Mr. Morris: If the hon. Gentleman has any specific point to make about design, I would be very interested to hear it. I am sure that all these matters are borne in mind by the Central Electricity Generating Board in its desire to minimise the impact of these very necessary towers on beautiful parts of the country.

Mr. Shinwell: If these pylons are to be camouflaged or repainted in this way, would my hon. Friend give an assurance that they will not be painted in antinationalisation Tory colours?

Charges (South-East Area)

Mr. Boston: asked the Minister of Power if he is aware that increased electricity charges in the South-East are the result of the obligations imposed on the electricity supply industry by the last Government's White Paper, The Financial Obligations of the Nationalised Industries; and if he will seek to reverse the policy contained in that White Paper.

Mr. Frederick Lee: I cannot altogether agree with my hon. Friend's assumption and would refer him to the reply given by my right hon. Friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, Central (Mr. Palmer) on 22nd December, 1964.

Mr. Boston: Would my right hon. Friend accept that had it been in order I would have preferred to have asked him to what extent this policy has resulted in these charges? Can he give that information?

Mr. Lee: The South-East Board introduced new tariffs in 1962 and again in 1963 at levels which were then calculated to enable it to reach its target as agreed with the Government under the White Paper policy. The increase in April, 1965, was due to increased costs and not to any change in the target.

New Power Station (Portishead)

Mr. Palmer: asked the Minister of Power what proposals have been put to him for a new power station at Portishead, Bristol; and how far the fuelling of the station would be assisted by the construction of the new Portbury dock.

Mr. John Morris: None, Sir. It is too early to say what assistance a new Port-bury Dock might provide.

Mr. Palmer: Is my hon. Friend saying that no proposals of any kind have been before his Department?

Mr. Morris: I am merely saying that the Central Electricity Generating Board recently announced that it was investigating an area near Portishead as a possible site for a power station. There are no proposals as yet.

Mr. Dean: Since Portishead is in my constituency, would the Parliamentary


Secretary give an assurance that, in the event of this proposal coming forward, Portishead Council will be consulted from the earliest stages and that any plans will be subject to the normal planning procedures? Is he aware that Portishead Council has stated on a number of occasions that it is not opposed in principle to further industrial development, provided it takes place in the industrial area of Portishead?

Mr. Morris: I am sure that the remarks of the hon. Gentleman will be borne in mind. All I can say at the moment is that if the Board proposed to proceed with the construction of a third station the Ministry of Transport and the National Ports Council would be consulted.

Mr. Robert Cooke: Am I to take it from the Parliamentary Secretary's previous reply that there is to be a new Portbury Dock?

Mr. Morris: If the hon. Gentleman had listened to my answer he would have understood it was recently announced that the Central Electricity Generating Board was investigating the area near Portishead as a possible site for a new power station.

Oral Answers to Questions — MINISTRY OF POWER

Steel Industry

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne: asked the Minister of Power when he proposes to introduce into the House the Government's Bill to renationalise the steel industry.

Mr. Frederick Lee: I have nothing to add to the statements made by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister on 24th June and my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary on 6th July.

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne: Can the Minister tell us whether his recent statement that the Government intended to press ahead with the nationalisation of the steel industry was an expression of personal opinion? If not, what other members of the Government agree with the right hon. Gentleman in this approach?

Mr. Lee: There is strict unanimity throughout the whole Government on that matter.

Mr. Ridley: Is the Minister aware that neither the Prime Minister on that occasion nor the Parliamentary Secretary on the other occasion gave a straight answer to the question? Can we now be told whether this obnoxious Measure to nationalise steel has been dropped or not?

Mr. Lee: The hon. Member has gone farther than his hon. Friend, who did not call it obnoxious. The straight answer is "No, it has not".

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne: asked the Minister of Power what discussions he has had with representatives of the steel industries following Her Majesty's Government's offer to consider proposals for Government control of the industry involving less than 100 per cent. ownership; and with what results.

Mr. Kenneth Lewis: asked the Minister of Power how many meetings he has had with representatives of the steel industry since the publication of the White Paper; and what decisions he has reached arising out of such meetings.

Mr. Frederick Lee: As regards contacts with the British Iron and Steel Federation there is nothing to add to my Answer of 25th May to the hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mr. William Yates). I have, however, had discussions with certain companies about specific points arising out of the White Paper.

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne: Can the right hon. Gentleman tell us whether, as the Minister responsible for this matter, he was properly consulted before this offer was made, and also what he has done to draw the attention of the industry concerned to this offer?

Mr. Lee: Since the offer there has been an exchange of letters between the President of the Federation and myself. We have not as yet reached unanimity about the kind of thing that we should like to discuss, and therefore no meetings have taken place.

Mr. Lewis: Is not that a disgraceful answer? The Minister may laugh, but it is not a laughing matter. A clear promise was made from the Government Front Bench that the right hon. Gentlemen would be prepared to listen but they have taken no initiative, as they should have done, to have meetings with


the industry. If, as the Minister says, he is going to nationalise the steel industry, it is clear that talks are necessary. If he is not going to nationalise it, he ought to keep faith with his own back benchers, on whose behalf the First Secretary made the promise.

Mr. Lee: The Federation and all the relevant firms are quite clear that when they wish to see me on any issue arising from steel nationalisation I am at their disposal. As the hon. Member would know if he had followed the debates that we have had on steel, I have had many meetings with the Federation, besides individual firms and trade unions. As far as I am concerned, I am still open to receive any representations from them.

Mr. David Griffiths: Is my right hon. Friend aware that, apart from a lot of bunkum that has been spoken from the other side, I know one or two Members and owners in the steel industry who are quite satisfied with the principle and proposal that we intend to undertake?

Mr. Lee: There is a good deal of knowledge among steel people that this will be a very good thing both for the country and for themselves.

Sir Knox Cunningham: Will the right hon. Gentleman approach his right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and find out whether he proposes to implement the promise that he made in this House about the Steel Bill earlier this year?

Mr. Lee: I take it that the hon. Member is referring to the sessional point. As I believe my right hon. Friend said, this is a question of the length of the Session. It is a question that only the Leader of the House can answer, and I suggest that the hon. Member puts his Question to my right hon. Friend.

Mr. Ridley: My hon. Friend the Member for South Angus (Mr. Bruce-Gardyne) asked the Minister whether he was consulted before the First Secretary made his offer to listen to representations from the steel industry. Will he now answer that question?

Mr. Lee: The First Secretary and I are in constant consultation on a very wide range of subjects.

Gas and Electricity Boards (Manufacturing Capacity)

Mr. Sheldon: asked the Minister of Power, in the light of his proposed legislation on the subject, what is the extent of manufacturing capacity of the Gas and Electricity Boards, other than supply; and what plans he has to extend such manufacturing capacity.

Mr. Frederick Lee: The capacity of the nationalised gas industry and the Central Electricity Generating Board to manufacture plant and equipment is at present negligible. It would be for the industries to initiate proposals for expanding their capacity within their statutory powers.

Mr. Sheldon: Does my right hon. Friend agree that the manufacture of a wide range of gas and electrical appliances and equipment would be in the best interests of the nationalised industries concerned, to the extent that this would create more fully integrated industries? Will he consider this point and see what he can do in order to emulate some of the best examples of private enterprise in this regard?

Mr. Lee: As my hon. Friend will remember, my right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport, on 31st March, made a statement about the Government's proposal to introduce legislation for that purpose. That is still the policy of the Government.

Fuel Policy

Mr. Ridsdale: asked the Minister of Power what he estimates to be the social costs of Her Majesty's Government's present fuel policy.

Mr. Frederick Lee: In determining fuel policy the Government are taking into account the social and other costs of various alternatives, but these costs cannot be precisely quantified.

Mr. Ridsdale: Does not the Minister recall that I drew attention to an article in The Times which put the social costs at £600 million? Could he comment on that?

Mr. Lee: My comment would be that the author of that article wrote also that this £600 million was only aguess.

Mr. Norwood: asked the Minister of Power, whether he will give estimates for the year 1970 of the proportion of the total requirements for gas and electricity, respectively, which will be met from hydrocarbon-type primary sources, and the proportion of these requirements which will be met by the use of coal as a primary fuel.

Mr. Frederick Lee: These are matters which are being examined in my current review of fuel policy.

Mr. Norwood: Does that mean that the Minister is unable to give any indication at all of the likely basis of secondary generation either of gas or electricity from the two primary fuels about which I have asked?

Mr. Lee: It would be very wrong of me, in advance of the calculations which we are making, to try to anticipate the results which we will get.

Power Stations (Fuel Requirements)

Mr. Ridley: asked the Minister of Power what esimate he has made of the future reduction in coal production which will follow as a result of atomic energy becoming competitive with coal-fired power stations.

Mr. Frederick Lee: The future use of fuel by power stations is under examination in my current review of fuel policy and of the prospects of the coal industry, but it is clear that the use of coal by power stations will increase substantially over the next few years.

Mr. Ridley: I know that this is a complicated matter, but will the Minister give an assurance that he will not hold back the development of atomic power stations for the sake of the coal industry?

Mr. Lee: I think that I have given that assurance many times.

Mr. Snow: Will my right hon. Friend bear in mind that if there are reductions in fuel made in connection with atomic energy production, they should be in the direction of making economies in the importation of oil?

Mr. Lee: There is a Question down later on that subject.

Mr. Wingfield Digby: Is it not a fact, however inconvenient it may be for a

country rich in coal, that oil, as well as atomic power, is a cheaper method of generating electricity than coal?

Mr. Lee: The economics of each of these industries are changing rapidly. I do not think that it is an embarrassment to be so well off in fuel supplies. It is a question of getting the balance of them right.

Mr. Palmer: Is my right hon. Friend aware that even with the maximum construction of nuclear power stations, with an 8 per cent. increase in electricity production every year, the increased use of coal will be absolute in power stations for 15 years, and is not likely to be decreased, on the estimates of the C.E.G.B., until the year 2000? In the circumstances, why should the coal industry be continually belittled in this way by the Opposition?

Mr. Lee: I would not care to speculate to the year 2000, but I agree with my hon. Friend in principle that, as far ahead as we can see, there will be an increase in demand for coal by the electricity industry.

Mr. Lubbock: Does the Minister agree that there have been projections of the fuel requirements of the Central Electricity Generating Board up to 1975? What analysis has been made or published showing the various sources—coal, nuclear power, hydro and oil—from which this expansion will be made?

Mr. Lee: That is precisely the work on which we are now engaged in the Energy Advisory Council. I hope to make an announcement before long.

North Sea (Oil and Gas)

Mr. Derek Page: asked the Minister of Power when he will make a statement on the progress of the search for oil and gas in the North Sea.

Mr. Gower: asked the Minister of Power what progress has been made in the search for oil and gas under the North Sea; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Frederick Lee: Three exploration wells have been completed and another three are in the course of being drilled.

Mr. Page: Will the Minister bear in mind the tremendous implications of this


exploration for economic development and employment in East Anglia? Will he ensure that the House is given the earliest news of any developments?

Mr. Lee: I should be very pleased indeed to announce early developments in this matter.

Mr. Gower: Will the Minister bear in mind the tremendous implications of this for the whole country, not only for East Anglia?

Mr. Peyton: When will the right hon. Gentleman cease to be content with the progress made in allocation by the previous Administration? When will he take steps to make a further allocation of licences?

Mr. Lee: We are working very actively on that now and I do not think that it will be very long before the hon. Gentleman knows the results.

Consultative Councils

Mrs. Joyce Butler: asked the Minister of Power what consideration he has given to the desirability of replacing the present power consultative councils by independent consumer councils; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. John Morris: I cannot accept my hon. Friend's imputation that the present councils are not independent, but if she has any particular suggestions to make I shall be glad to consider them.

Mrs. Butler: Does my hon. Friend appreciate that well-informed consumers can make a valuable contribution to improved services, and possibly also to reduce costs, if they are given appropriate facilities? Would there not be some advantage in channelling all the complaints which are received through area consumer councils with some clearly defined executive powers to remedy them?

Mr. Morris: We are, of course, always prepared to consider any suggestions for improving the present arrangements, but my hon. Friend will be aware that there are district committees to these consultative councils.

Research and Development

Mr. Raphael Tuck: asked the Minister of Power what steps he has taken to encourage co-operation between the

nationalised fuel and power industries in research and development.

Mr. Frederick Lee: I approached the industries earlier this year to see if the co-operation which is already good could be further improved. The national Coal Board and the Central Electricity Generating Board have for some time had a Research Liaison Committee, and I am glad to announce that the Gas Council has now joined with them to form a joint Liaison Committee of the three industries for research and development, so that their scientific potential may be used to the fullest advantage. The primary, though not the exclusive, objective is the improvement of coal utilisation technology.

Mr. Tuck: Is my right hon. Friend aware that his reply will give great satisfaction, at least to hon. Members on this side of the House? Would he indicate whether, as a result of this envisaged co-operation, we can expect a substantial saving in the amounts of money spent by both electricity and gas in advertising against one another?

Mr. Lee: I said that the main objective was to look at coal utilisation technology. The research programmes of the three industries are quite extensive; but I want to bring them into closer co-operation, and I am dosing so. I think that the best way of making a start is by getting at the very genesis of their work in research and development.

Dr. Bray: Would my right hon. Friend consider checking whether their co-operation extends to market research in view of the complicated interactions of the tariffs as between electricity, the bulk supply tariffs, and gas tariffs?

Mr. Lee: At the moment we are mainly concerned with coal utilisation, but I do not rule out what my hon. Friend said. I will put that point forward.

Oil Imports (Cost)

Mr. Palmer: asked the Minister of Power if he will make available figures showing the true net cost of importing oil into the United Kingdom in terms of the balance of payments over the last decade.

Mr. Frederick Lee: The visible deficit—that is to say the differences between the value of oil imports c.i.f. and exports f.o.b.—rose from £257 million in 1955 to £485 million last year. The cost to the balance of payments was less than these figures indicate because much of the oil imports was carried in British ships, and much of it came from United Kingdom companies' concessions overseas where the cost of producing the oil was less than the market valuation on which the Trade and Navigation Account figures are based. There were also substantial invisible earnings from the overseas business of British oil companies.

Mr. Palmer: Would not my right hon. Friend agree that over the years the cost of bringing oil to this country has been steadily increasing, and does this not have some very important bearing on the national fuel policy which he is engaged in working out at present?

Mr. Lee: Yes, Sir. But it would be a mistake to assume that the differences I have mentioned were all a charge on the balance of payments. For instance, the international work of B.P. and Shell has a very great credit side to it in regard to balance of payments.

Mr. Peyton: Whilst I fully appreciate the very fair way in which the right hon. Gentleman has answered that supplementary question, may I ask him whether he would consider filling in on some convenient occasion some of the details of his first Answer? I think that that would offer to his hon. Friends some badly needed illumination.

Mr. Lee: Anybody who tries to analyse the total effect of the whole operation on balance of payments knows what a fantastic job it is. On the other hand, I have felt that we could produce more figures than have been produced and I will see whether that is now possible.

Mr. Harold Walker: When my right hon. Friend fills in the details will he fill in the details of the proportions of military expenditure incurred east of Suez in maintaining the supply of oil?

Mr. Philip Noel-Baker: I agree with the Minister about the offsets against the gross figures on imports, but does it not remain true that there is room for more economy on balance of payments by

restricting the use of oil—for example, by electrifying the railways, and by using other means of producing power?

Mr. Lee: As my right hon. Friend knows, I am extremely keen to increase the use of coal, whether as coal itself or burnt by wire. The cost of the balance of payments is, of course, one of the very vital issues we take into account when evolving our fuel policy.

Oral Answers to Questions — COAL

Mineworkers' Pension Scheme

Mr. Woof: asked the Minister of Power what recent requests he has received for approval of increased pensions under the Mineworkers' Pension Scheme.

Mr. John Morris: None, Sir.

Mr. Woof: Could my hon. Friend say whether or not his right hon. Friend still has the authority to approve such pension increases and, further, would he confirm or deny recent Press reports that the aged miners' pension funds amounts to no less than £79,412,000? If this is correct, could he explain factors as to why such a sum cannot be used to raise the general level of the aged mineworkers' pensions?

Mr. Morris: On the first part of my hon. Friend's supplementary question, the scheme is administered by representatives of the Board and the N.U.M. The levels of contributions and benefits are fixed by the scheme and any amendments, including increases, are approved by the Minister, but the initiative for any changes comes from the industry. On the second part, the scheme has to be actuarially sound and the total of funds available—I confirm that it is £79 million—is the amount necessary to meet current and future demands for benefits.

Mr. David Griffiths: Is it not time for a more constructive consideration of this matter? The fund now amounts to £79 million. I can remember the time when it was more than £90 million. I do not know where the difference of nearly £20 million has gone, but it has not gone on increased pensions.

Mr. Morris: As I told my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Mr. Woof), I


have received no representations about the scheme. Secondly, the scheme has to be actuarially sound and pensions are bound to be small as yet because the scheme is still, relatively, in its infancy. However, the Board granted free back-service credits to augment pensions and a minimum pension of £1 a week has been introduced. As years pass, members qualify for higher pensions up to a maximum of about £3 a week.

Sir C. Osborne: Is it possible to increase these pensions without increasing the price of coal? In view of Lord Robens' statement only last week that the coal mining industry would price itself out of existence completely unless coal was reduced in price, is it not impossible to increase these charges?

Mr. Morris: As the hon. Member is aware, the scheme has to be actuarially sound and the levels of contributions and benefits are fixed by the scheme.

National Coal Board (Publications)

Mr. Grant: asked the Minister of Power row many publications each year are sent to members of the public by the National Coal Board; and what is the annual cost.

Mr. John Morris: This information is not available in my Department. I am asking the Chairman of the National Coal Board to write to the hon. Member.

Mr. Grant: This is all very well, but is the Parliamentary Secretary aware that it is impossible to challenge expenditure of the nationalised industries unless we can get this information? Is he aware that a large number of my constituents were very annoyed to receive recently an expensive glossy publication of the National Coal Board with free knitting samples in colour? What has this got to do with the Coal Board? Can the Minister do nothing to curb this waste of public money?

Mr. Morris: I am afraid that the hon. Member, like some of his colleagues, is suffering from political schizophrenia on this. As recently as 11th March, when moving an Amendment to the Gas Bill in Standing Committee to do with Stamp Duty, he was trying to put the nationalised industries on a par with commercial undertakings. Now, when a commercial

undertaking like the National Coal Board sells its products in the manner deemed best for itself, the hon. Member seeks to criticise it.

Miners

Mr. Urwin: asked the Minister of Power how many miners have left the coalmining industry during 1965; and what is the number of vacancies in each division of the National Coal Board.

Mr. John Morris: During the 24 weeks to 12th June, 1965, the total number of men leaving the industry was 32,000; this includes retirements from age or ill health as well as those leaving voluntarily for other reasons. During the same period nearly 15,000 men were recruited.
I understand from the National Coal Board that there are vacancies in several areas at the present time, and I will ask the Chairman to write to my hon. Friend.

Mr. Urwin: Would my hon. Friend agree that a rather serious situation is developing from the manpower point of view in the mining industry? Would he further agree that there is growing concern among those employed in the industry because of the closure of pits, resulting in quite large numbers of men having to seek alternative employment outside the industry? Is my hon. Friend satisfied that if this situation continues to develop at the present rate, the coal industry can achieve the target set for it by the Minister of Power?

Mr. Morris: I agree that this matter is causing concern. In my reply of 6th July to the hon. Member for Lewisham, West (Mr. McNair-Wilson), I said that I understood from the Board that its labour force was about 5,000 below its manpower objective for the country as a whole for 1965–66.

Mr. Mitchell: Is the Minister aware that there is not much to be gained from recruiting additional labour into loss-making mines, thus increasing the production of coal at a further loss to the country?

Mr. Morris: That, of course, is a matter for the National Coal Board.

Concessionary Coal

Mr. Box: asked the Minister of Power whether, in regard to future wage


negotiations with National Coal Board employees he will, in the public interest, give a general direction to the National Coal Board to take into account the present high cost of concessionary coal and to make a suitable adjustment in wage rates so as to allow and compensate for the cancellation of this concession.

Mr. John Morris: No, Sir.

Mr. Box: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that concessionary coal, issued either in kind or in cash in lieu, tax-free, now amounts to a value of £50 million a year? As it is issued to administrative grades up to the level of area chairmen, in addition to miners, does he not agree that it is now time, in the light of the Government's attack on tax-free allowances, for the position to be looked into, and an adjustment made in salary rates so as to allow for the giving up of concessionary coal?

Mr. Morris: Whilst I appreciate the hon. Gentleman's continued interest in the welfare of miners, I think that he must show some sense of reality about this matter, in that, first, terms and conditions of employment are matters for settlement between boards and the unions; secondly, these concessions are made under longstanding agreements, many dating back to pre-nationalisation days, and relate to employees and certain dependants and pensioners; thirdly, here, as in other industries, fringe benefits like luncheon vouchers, pension schemes and special housing are relevant factors in wage negotiations.

MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT (FINANCIAL INTERESTS)

Mr. William Hamilton: asked the Prime Minister if he will introduce legislation providing that all Members of Parliament in both Houses shall register all their financial interests in outside bodies, and that such a register should be freely available to the public.

The Prime Minister (Mr. Harold Wilson): No, Sir.

Mr. Hamilton: I am disappointed by my right hon. Friend's reply. Does he not agree that if we had had this information

in the course of the debates on the Finance Bill we could have been even better able to judge the objectivity of the the speeches made? Would my right hon. Friend consider the possibility of hiring, perhaps on an ad hoc basis, Mr. Roth to do the job for us when the next Finance Bill comes before us.

The Prime Minister: I cannot imagine that any legislation would provide information on this subject that my hon. Friend is not able to obtain as a result of his own diligent researches. I should have thought that any criticism there might be of speeches on the Finance Bill from right hon. and hon. Members opposite would arise, not so much from any particular interest that may be described in their speeches, but more in their sheer reaction against any suggestion of modernising our tax structure.

Sir G. Nicholson: Is it not deplorable to suggest that members of all parties act otherwise than in the best interests of the country?

The Prime Minister: I did not quite catch what the hon. Gentleman said, but I think that there has been a longstanding tradition in this House that hon. Members who have an interest to declare, declare that interest, even apart from any votes.

Sir G. Nicholson: That is not an answer to my question, Mr. Speaker. May I repeat it?

Mr. Speaker: Perhaps we can have another one on the way and then come back.

Mr. Grimond: Would not the Prime Minister agree that if Members were to register their financial interest with outside bodies, outside bodies would have to register their interest with Members? There are some Members who, quite properly in my view, are supported in one way or another by outside bodies. We will get involved in very difficult territory if we pursue this much further.

The Prime Minister: I remember more than once from the Opposition Benches wondering whether we would not get into a position where we might need to have legislation—

Mr. Speaker: Order. I suspend the sitting for four minutes.

Sitting resumed—

Mr. Speaker: Order. In view of the entirely exceptional circumstances, I ask the House to give me leave to defy the Standing Order and to allow another five minutes for Question Time.

The Prime Minister: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am sure that will be for the convenience of the House.
I think the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Grimond) was referring to registration of outside bodies. On a number of occasions some of us have raised the question of whether we were getting in danger of a situation like that in Washington where they have had to register lobbies. I do not think that is the position, although there have been problems in the past, not where an hon. Member has made a speech and declared an interest, but where there has been some use by hon. Members in promoting social occasions downstairs and in other ways of the promotion of companies which have employed hon. Members particularly as public relations officers. I think a great deal of improvement has taken place in this matter as a result of concern expressed in all parts of the House.

Mr. Ridsdale: Does the Prime Minister recall that exactly 10 years ago to the day he was challenged to declare what his interest was in the timber trade, as reported in the OFFICIAL REPORT, Vol. 543 at col. 1952? As he has taken 10 years to meet that challenge, will he say what those interests were?

The Prime Minister: I thank the hon. Member for that little personal reference. I have not looked this up myself, but I think he will find that on 30th November, 1951, which is more than 10 years ago, I had already declared such interest as I had. Although I had no financial interest he will find that that occurred as soon as I was appointed to a minor position in the timber industry. It was announced publicly. It was also announced when I gave it up and I announced it in this House. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear."]

Mr. Speaker: Order. Mr. William Hamilton.

Sir G. Nicholson: rose—

Mr. Speaker: I had half forgotten the promise I had made.

Sir G. Nicholson: I asked whether the Prime Minister did not regret and deplore anything in speeches and questions in this House which tends to imply that hon. Members of all parties act otherwise than in what they conceive to be the best interests of the House? Will he enhance his own reputation and add to the dignity of the House by doing all he can to raise the level of political controversy?

The Prime Minister: Yes, Sir. I do not think the preceding question particularly helped to raise the level of political controversy. I think some of us in this House would like to see occasionally at Question Time or in debates a concrete suggestion made on policy instead of the constant muck-racking we are getting.

ELECTORAL BOUNDARIES

Mr. William Hamilton: asked the Prime Minister if he will introduce legislation to remove the present bias in the drawing of electoral boundaries in favour of rural and middle-class areas.

The Prime Minister: I have nothing to add to the Answer which I gave on 3rd June to a similar Question by my hon. Friend.

Mr. Hamilton: Has my right hon. Friend considered some of the suggestions that the Boundary Commission has produced in this matter? Is he aware that some of them are completely inexplicable? May I give an example? Is my right hon. Friend aware that for the Bromley borough, a middle-class Tory borough with an electorate of 207,000, it is suggested that there should be four Members of Parliament, while for Southwark, a predominantly Labour borough with a 208,000 electorate, it is suggested that there should be three? In Bexley, with an electorate of 151,000, is he aware that three Members are suggested and again that is a predominantly middle-class Tory area? Will my right hon. Friend give an assurance in view of this—

Mr. Speaker: Perhaps the Prime Minister could answer as to how far he is aware of these matters.

The Prime Minister: Yes, Sir. I think I was aware. I seem to remember my hon. Friend quoting these figures before, so I am broadly aware of the point, but the review of the Boundary Commission is an interim report and is not yet incorporated in a general review of the whole country. Still less has Parliament been asked to pronounce on these matters. When we have a little more experience of the working of the Boundary Commission—this is the first work it has done under the 1958 Act—we can see whether the quotas have been going wrong. My impression, particularly in view of something the Commission indicated, was that it is working more towards rather more equal quotas now than in the past.

Mr. Goodhart: Is the Prime Minister aware that in the Borough of Bromley, which has been referred to, local Labour parties have not objected to the Commission's proposals although it was perfectly open to them to do so?

The Prime Minister: I do not know whether the local Labour Party, the Conservative Party or any other party has objected. The point before us is the question of equality, or reasonable equality, of electoral districts. In the past they have not been all that equal, but I think there are signs that they are going to be more equal in future.

CRIMINAL OFFENDERS (PENALTIES AND METHODS OF TREATMENT)

Sir J. Langford-Holt: asked the Prime Minister whether he will advise Her Majesty to appoint a Royal Commission to consider variations of the range and type of punishments for crime.

The Prime Minister: The Royal Commission on the Penal System is already considering whether any changes are desirable in the penalties and methods of treatment available to the courts when they deal with offenders.

Mr. Hector Hughes: Does the Prime Minister realise that the present type and range of punishment, according to up-to-

the-moment statistics, are quite inadequate to deal with the range of crime taking place at present and that some other means must be devised to deal with criminals with a view to deterring them from committing crimes?

The Prime Minister: I think this is a matter for the Royal Commission. Its terms of reference are quite adequate for going into the matter raised by my hon. and learned Friend. Two very distinguished hon. Members of this House are concerned with the work of the Royal Commission and I am sure that everything my hon. and learned Friend has mentioned will be in the mind of the Commission.

Mr. Sharples: Would not the Prime Minister agree that the setting up of this Royal Commission by the previous Administration was more than justified by recent events?

The Prime Minister: The hon. Member has been working terribly hard to score a point about the old Government, but there was very strong pressure on that Government when they saw the Report of the Labour Party Commission headed by my noble Friend, Lord Longford.

SALE OF ARMS

Mr. Marten: asked the Prime Minister if he will outline Her Majesty's Government's present policy about the sale of arms.

The Prime Minister: It is the general policy of Her Majesty's Government to promote the sale of British defence equipment to allied, Commonwealth and other friendly Governments. The political economic, strategic and security considerations are examined in each case before an export is approved.

Mr. Marten: Are the Government intending to appoint a super salesman on the lines of the American appointment of a super salesman for arms?

The Prime Minister: I think there is a very strong desire that we should make more effective arrangements for placing British arms particularly for our allies because, as I said in a speech at the N.A.T.O. Conference, one of the things which was unbalancing the situation in


the alliance was the very high pressure salesmanship of America, as we found when we tried to sell to Germany, Italy and France. The Americans themselves said they would welcome our appointing what the hon. Member calls a super salesman, and this we shall do.

Mr. Orme: Is my right hon. Friend aware that some arms sold to Iraq have been used against a very fine minority of people, the Kurdestan people in that country, to suppress them? Will he make representations to the Iraqi Government to desist using British arms for this purpose?

The Prime Minister: That is a much wider question. One of the considerations that apply when Ministers have to review the sale of arms is whom they are going to, for what they are intended and whether it is in British interests that they should be sold.

Mr. Peter Thomas: Following the Prime Minister's answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Mr. Marten), how would the Prime Minister define a friendly Government?

The Prime Minister: The right hon. and learned Gentleman spent so many years at the Foreign Office that if he has not learned how to define it, it is not for me to teach him.

MINISTER OF TRANSPORT (TELEVISION BROADCAST)

Mr. Robert Cooke: asked the Prime Minister whether the public statement of the Minister of Transport in a British Broadcasting Corporation television broadcast on 10th June on the subject of the new road programme represents the policy of Her Majesty's Government.

The Prime Minister: Yes, Sir.

Mr. Cooke: Is the Prime Minister aware that his right hon. Friend said that new motorists coming on to the road these days by and large were supporters of the Labour Party? How does this extraordinary statement tie up with a balanced and fair road programme?

The Prime Minister: I was not aware of that particular remark of my right hon. Friend's. I think it is a very wise one. It is, however, I should have

thought, a remark with some political content which might be regarded as controversial. I thought that the hon. Gentleman was concerned with the governmental aspects of my right hon. Friend's statement. It sounds to me to have been a very good statement.

Mr. Allason: Is it the policy of the Government to restrict the purchase of motor cars for use in cities?

The Prime Minister: I am not aware of any policy on those lines, and certainly motor car sales have been extremely active recently. How one would apply a condition of sale to the effect, "This car, when bought, should turn round as soon as the 30 mile speed limit is reached" I am not at all certain.

IMMIGRATION (LORD MOUNTBATTEN'S REPORT)

Captain Walter Elliot: asked the Prime Minister if he will seek the agreement of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers to the publication of the Lord Mountbatten Report on immigration.

The Prime Minister: No, Sir.

Captain Elliot: Would the Prime Minister reconsider his Answer? Is he aware that it seems to indicate that, whereas the Commonwealth Prime Ministers might agree to the publication of this Report, the British Government would not? Has not he himself paid tribute to the Report? Does he not feel that it would be highly valuable for the rest of us to have a look at it?

The Prime Minister: There is no warrant at all for the hon. and gallant Gentleman's suggestion that there is any desire on the part of Commonwealth Prime Ministers that this Report should be published. The whole basis of this Mission was that Lord Mountbatten and his colleagues could speak completely frankly to all Commonwealth Prime Ministers and that they, in turn, could speak frankly, with the idea of getting a really effective immigration policy for this country. I am sure that if there had been any suggestion at the beginning of the Mission that what was said by Commonwealth Prime Ministers to Lord Mountbatten would be published we


could not have had the degree of co-operation we have had.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home: The Prime Minister has told us that he will produce a White Paper or make a statement. Will he confirm that this will be based on Lord Mountbatten's Report? Does not all the Prime Minister's recent experience in the months since October confirm how foolish and wrong it was for him and his party to vote against the Commonwealth Immigrants Act?

The Prime Minister: The White Paper, when it is finalised, will certainly take full account of Lord Mountbatten's Report and of his recommendations, though in the last resort it is for the Goverment to take responsibility. My predecessor as Leader of the Labour Party in Opposition made plain when we voted against the Act that what we were voting against was, first, the degree of colour prejudice in it—[HON. MEMBERS: "No."]—secondly, the fact that it did not represent the result of consultations with Commonwealth countries, and, thirdly, that at that time the then Government were considering allowing freedom of movement for Europeans in this country when they would have denied it to Commonwealth citizens. However, when we got into power we certainly found that the Act was not working as right hon. Members opposite pretended that it was.

Mr. Ennals: Will my right hon. Friend resist the pressure from the Opposition to impose limitations which would prevent members of a family joining an immigrant, because this has been suggested by hon. Members opposite?

The Prime Minister: It is not my job to co-ordinate the Opposition Front Bench, but I am doing my best to reconcile the sensible recommendation of the Leader of the Opposition that dependants should be allowed to join their families in this country with the statement by the right hon. and learned Member for Wirral (Mr. Selwyn Lloyd), which seems to be totally opposed to it.

Mr. Speaker: Mr. Lubbock, Private Notice Question.

Mr. Hector Hughes: On a point of order. In view of the very unfortunate interruption of Questions today, and as

there are only three more Questions left for my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister to answer, would you, Mr. Speaker, consider asking the House to agree to extra time so that those three Questions may be answered?

Mr. Speaker: The hon. and learned Gentleman is so persuasive that I am afraid that if I once did that somebody would propose it again.

RAILWAYS (SOUTHERN REGION SERVICES)

Mr. Lubbock: Mr. Lubbock (by Private Notice) asked the Minister of Transport if he will make a statement about the disruption of services on the Southern Region of British Railways.

The Minister of Transport (Mr. Tom Fraser): Yes, Sir. I much regret the inconvenience at present being suffered by so many users of the Southern Region services.
The operation and timekeeping of railway services are, of course, the responsibility of the Railways Board. The Chairman had an informal meeting this morning with the full Executive Committee of the Association of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen at which the subject of productivity payments was further discussed. Another meeting with all the parties concerned has been arranged for next week.
In the meantime, I appeal to all concerned to do everything in their power to see that the full normal service to the public is provided.

Mr. Lubbock: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that I am most grateful to him for his appeal to all parties to see that normal services are restored pending the result of these fresh negotiations between Mr. Raymond and A.S.L.E.F.? Does he realise that the lives of millions of people have been thrown into complete chaos by the go-slow on the part of the motormen?
On the other hand, does he also realise that they have a grievance, in that these negotiations have been in progress for many months and that, since the dispute blew up last November and there was a similar episode, apparently there has been no progress whatsoever? Have we to wait until there are riots and perhaps people are injured on the platforms before the


Minister and his right hon. Friend the Minister of Labour will take any part in the settlement of this dispute?

Mr. Fraser: I hope very much that there will not be riots on the platforms. I mentioned the meeting which the Chairman had with the full Executive Committee of A.S.L.E.F. this morning. The other union concerned—the N.U.R.—is in conference and it will be available next week. The two unions concerned are anxious to proceed with the discussions in a responsible way. I have appealed to all concerned to play the game and not to impose quite unnecessary suffering on the travelling public.

Mr. Deedes: Is the Minister aware that a disagreeable and unusual feature of this dispute is the fact that relationships between travellers and members of the railway staff who have no part in this dispute are deteriorating? For this reason alone, although appreciating his difficulties and those of his right hon. Friend the Minister of Labour, there is urgent reason for the right hon. Gentlemen to consider this dispute very seriously and do all in their power to bring influence to bear on the parties concerned.

Mr. Fraser: I appreciate what the right hon. Gentleman has said. However, I think that he would not wish either my right hon. Friend or myself to intervene, unless we were sure that we were intervening for the better. I have discussed this matter rather fully both with my hon. Friend the Minister of Labour and with the Chairman of the Railways Board. They are at present satisfied that it would be better to leave the discussions to be carried through between the Board and the two trade unions principally concerned.
Meantime, I think that it would be better if we could all of us do our utmost to ensure that the members of the respective trade unions support their own union, because in that way we are most likely to get the right answer to the problem.

Mr. Goodhart: Will the Minister of Transport bear in mind that the frustration of the commuters is compounded of the fact that new official schedules have been introduced by British Railways in this region and that they have severely cut the services?

Mr. Fraser: I do not think that the discomfort suffered by the commuters at

present arises from the imposition of the new schedules. I think that it is quite well known to be due to another cause, and that we would all be missing the target if we were to attack the Railways Board for the introduction of new schedules.

Mr. Monslow: While welcoming the Minister's statement and his appeal, may I remind him that this is a longstanding dispute and that the decision ought to be expedited?

Mr. Fraser: It is a longstanding dispute, but I understand that it is the wish of the unions to get a national and not a regional settlement. That is what they are trying very hard to achieve.

Mr. Hunt: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that, as many of ray hon. Friends have said, the Southern Region of British Railways is fast approaching a state of complete anarchy? Thousands of my constituents and many others are being subjected to insupportable inconvenience and delay day after day. Before the right hon. Gentleman next takes over the control of an automaticaly driven train on the Central Line, as he did yesterday, will he please come to my constituency and take the controls of a train from Bromley, North to Cannon Street on any morning of the week and see whether the new schedules are workable as he has suggested?

Mr. Fraser: The House, I think, wishes the responsibility for the operation of the railways to remain with the Railways Board and not to be passed over to the Minister of Transport. I think that the wish of all of us at the moment is to get the differences between the unions and the management resolved. I do not wish to say anything at present that would in any way make this more difficult.

TRADE DISPUTE, COVENTRY (UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFIT)

Mr. Maurice Edelman: Mr. Maurice Edelman (by Private Notice) asked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance whether she is aware that a large number of workers of the Standard Motor Company, Coventry, are deprived of any unemployment benefit for time lost due to stoppage of work over which they have no control; and what action she has taken.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance (Mr. Norman Pentland): If my hon. Friend has in mind the stoppage which took place at the end of May and beginning of June, the present position is that decisions on test claims for unemployment benefit have been given covering nearly all those who lost work during the dispute. No appeals have yet been lodged.
If, however, my hon. Friend is referring to the stoppage which began yesterday, very few people have so far claimed benefit, and there has not yet been time for any claims to be decided.
As my hon. Friend will know, the trade dispute disqualification provisions in Section 13 of the National Insurance Act are to be examined by the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations.

Mr. Edelman: Is my hon. Friend aware that in the meantime a deep sense of grievance and injustice is felt by many workers at the anomalies which are occurring in the application of unemployment benefit? Is he aware, for example, that in one case a man working side by side on the same motor car with other workers in the same union was denied benefit while his colleagues received it?
Will my hon. Friend look carefully into the matter and see whether these anomalies are widespread, and what he can do to alleviate hardship in cases where workers are disallowed benefit when they have no responsibility for the strike in which they are involved?

Mr. Pentland: I can quite understand my hon. Friend's concern in this matter. My right hon. Friend and I are fully aware of all the problems that can stem from the trade dispute disqualification. Indeed, I myself on more than one occasion in my working life have been affected by the trade dispute disqualification. It was because we were aware of the problem and of the hardship that could stem from this disqualification that we were pleased, following our consultations with the Minister of Labour, to find that it was possible to confirm that the trade dispute disqualification was within the purview of the Royal Commission.
I can assure my hon. Friend that it is within the Royal Commission's terms of

reference, and that the Commission is seeking evidence on this disqualification. I must further advise my hon. Friend that decisions on benefit claims are entirely in the province of the adjudicating authorities, and that my right hon. Friend has no power at all to comment on or intervene in any way in their decisions.

Mr. Buchan: While recognising that this is a question which should be left to the Commission, as he has suggested, may I ask my hon. Friend whether he is aware that in the meantime, not only in Coventry but in many other areas, the anomalies are so apparent and the injustices and hardships are so great, that it would assist if he would consider taking emergency measures, as has been done in this Session of Parliament with reference to other affairs, to widen this disqualification?

Mr. Pentland: It is for the reasons which my hon. Friend has enlarged upon that we have now decided to send the matter to the Royal Commission. My right hon. Friend has considered this matter thoroughly. She has examined every aspect and has not been able to find a solution to the problem. I might add that this is an extremely complicated subject, as every hon. Member knows.
Under previous Labour Governments, Ministers of Labour and Ministers of Pensions and National Insurance attempted to find a formula by which they could overcome these difficulties, but they were unable to do so and no solution was found. However, we are determined to do all we can in this matter, and that is the reason why it has gone to the Royal Commission.

PRIVATE MEMBER'S MOTION

Mr. Shinwell: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Recently, in the Ballot for Notices of Motions the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. John Hall) met with success. He obtained, I believe, the first preference. However, I understand that a debate is taking place this afternoon, immediately after we dispose of this business, on a Motion which came second in point of preference.
I wish to ask you, Sir, whether there is not some impropriety in the action that has been taken by the hon. Member for


Wycombe and whether his action is due to pressure brought to bear on him by the Opposition?

Mr. Speaker: I would not know anything about pressures. It is no good asking me. But as far as the substantial point is concerned, the hon. Member, I understand, did not table his Motion, so really nothing arises. Nor is it true to say that we are going on to discuss the Motion to which the right hon. Gentleman referred immediately after this business. There are other things to do. I suggest that we should pass on to those other matters.

Mr. Shinwell: Further to that point of order. Mr. Speaker. The hon. Member for Wycombe met with success in the Ballot and hon. Members naturally expect that a debate would take place on the Motion of which he gave notice. Now it has been withdrawn.

Mr. Speaker: That does not raise any point of order. I cannot help the right hon. Gentleman.

Mr. Sydney Silverman: Further to that point of order. Does it not raise this seeming impropriety in any case? I am not speaking of any question of pressure, which I do not know anything about and which would not concern you in any case, Sir, But the result is that No. 2 in the Ballot obtains priority which he would not have obtained if the ordinary rules had been observed. If the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. John Hall) had indicated at the time that he did not wish to move any Motion, presumably another draw would have been taken and possibly somebody else would have had No. I instead of the hon. Member for Wycombe.

Mr. Speaker: No point of order arises. If an hon. Member draws a position in the Ballot the House does not oblige him to make use of it. One may change one's view afterwards. It does not raise any point of order.

Sir G. de Freitas: Are we not entitled, Mr. Speaker, to assume that when an hon. member publicly announces that he is to move a certain Motion, he will do so? The hon. Member's withdrawal of this Motion has considerably inconvenienced hon. Members who regarded the

potential debate on our relations with Europe as most important.

Mr. Speaker: No, we have many such occasions. There is no impropriety about it.

Dame Irene Ward: To settle this matter, may I ask whether you, Mr. Speaker, would be so kind as to have the precedents looked up when Motions have been altered, withdrawn or not tabled so that Members opposite may understand the business of the House and the way to conduct it?

Mr. Speaker: I decline the invitation. I dislike compiling statistics.

SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL (MEMORIAL)

The Prime Minister (Mr. Harold Wilson): With permission, Mr. Speaker, I wish to make a statement.
As the House will know, a number of proposals have been made in the months since his death for permanent memorials to the late Member for Woodford, the right hon. Sir Winston Spencer Churchill.
I am now able to inform the House that there have been consultations with the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, and with the right hon. Gentlemen who lead the parties in Parliament, about the provision of a suitable memorial in Westminster Abbey. After ascertaining the wishes of Her Majesty the Queen, and with the full approval of Lady Spencer-Churchill, it has been arranged that a memorial stone should be placed in Westminster Abbey, immediately to the west of the tomb of the Unknown Warrior.
Her Majesty has graciously consented to unveil this stone on the occasion of the Battle of Britain Service which is to take place in the Abbey on 19th September, 1965.
I am sure that the House will agree that a memorial in the ancient Abbey of Westminster, associated with the two world wars in which he played so considerable a part, will be a fitting and worthy tribute to the memory of Sir Winston Churchill.
But, in addition to being a great national leader, the late Sir Winston Churchill holds a very special place in the


history and feelings of Parliament. This House wishes, I know, that suitable arrangements be made to perpetuate his memory within the Palace of Westminster.
Accordingly, the House in Committee will shortly be invited to agree to an Address to Her Majesty to give directions for a tribute at public expense. And, in accordance with precedents, a Committee, including Members of all parties, will be appointed to advise on the form this tribute should take.

Hon. Members: Hear, hear.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home: May I respond at once to what the Prime Minister has said by saying that we on this side of the House agree with the recommendation that Sir Winston Churchill, as a great national figure, should be commemorated in this way in Westminster Abbey and also as a great Parliamentarian in the precincts of Parliament?

Mr. J. Grimond: On behalf of my hon. Friends, I welcome the statement which has been made by the Prime Minister.

SCOTTISH AFFAIRS

Matters of Arts and Amenities in Scotland and of Tourism in Scotland, being matters relating exclusively to Scotland, referred to the Scottish Grand Committee for their consideration.—[Mr. Bowden.]

PRIVATE STREET WORKS

3.55 p.m.

Mr. Terence Boston: I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend the law regarding private street works.
Perhaps I should clear up any shred of possible ambiguity at the outset by making it plain that the words in the Motion refer not to the problems of the pavement artist or roadside art exhibitions, but to a problem which presents a far worse picture—the problem of unmade roads. A Ministry of Housing and Local Government survey in 1960 estimated that there are 54,000 unmade roads, affecting perhaps 3 million people. These roads are not just a nuisance. They cause very real misery—[Interruption.]—and are a danger.

Mr. Speaker: Order. Will hon. Members be good enough to assist the hon. Gentleman to be heard? He is seeking the leave of the House.

Mr. Boston: I am grateful to you, Mr. Speaker.
As I was saying, these roads are not just a nuisance, but they are a cause of very real misery and are a danger as well; and I will come to one or two cases in a moment. The Bill would seek to help a little towards solving this problem. Before mentioning its aims, perhaps it would be better to say what it does not seek to do, because its aims are necessarily limited.
As for the general principle concerning private streets, it is the responsibility of frontagers themselves to make them up and the Bill would not seek to alter that general principle. Some people argue that the cost should be borne by the rates. There is some force in that argument, but the Bill would not seek to provide for that. Some people feel that the roads should be adopted by the highway authority as soon as they are substantially built on with dwellings and that the authority should then be responsible for making them up at the public expense. I have some sympathy with that view, especially if one regards housing as a public service, but the Bill would not go that far.
These people do not want something for nothing. Many of them have already


paid their road charges, or are willing to do so, but what they want is action. Ironically, the present law is weighted too much towards protecting reluctant frontagers from eager councils anxious to get on with making up the roads, whereas it should be weighted more towards helping eager residents to get reluctant councils to act.
The present law is contained in the Highways Act, 1959, Part IX of which substantially re-enacted provisions in the Public Health Act, 1875, now known as the Code of 1875, the Private Streets Works Act, 1892, known as the Code of 1892, and the New Streets Act, 1951—the Advance Payments Code of 1951—which provides for the payment of charges when all new buildings are erected. But the Highways Act made no major changes and it will be seen that this law goes back to "88 B.B.", that is, "Before Buchanan" and, therefore, there may be a strong case for its thorough simplification and further overhaul.
The Bill would have no such ambitious aims. There is power at the moment to require a highway authority to act under Section 203 of the Highways Act, which provides for a majority of the frontagers, either in number of in terms of length of the street which they occupy, to give notice to the local authority to make up the road at the frontagers' own expense. There is possibly a case for reducing these percentages if they get on with doing the work themselves. Some local authorities require 90 per cent. before they will actually get on with the work. Here, the right of appeal to the Minister needs looking at in determining priority in getting on with a particular street.
There is also power, but not a duty, to put down a temporary surface where urgent repairs are needed. This power is contained in Section 204 of that Act and also in Section 47 of the Public Health Act, 1961, but, again, there is no duty. There is also the power and once more not a duty under Section 210 by which the highway authority itself can bear either the whole or part of the cost of carrying out the work, but there is no real evidence that this is very effective. The main aim of the Bill would be to extend the power effectively and to impose a duty to put down a temporary surface, for instance, of hardcore.
I should like to say a few words about the problem itself. In a rural district in my constituency, for example, there are about 20 miles of unmade roads and many of these are well built on. In the parish of Minster there are 10 miles of quite substantially built-up roads. It might be interesting to refer to the sort of cases which occur as a result of the state of these roads and let the incidents speak for themselves.
Last February, before there was any possibility of contemplating the action which I am now taking, I received a letter from a resident which, among other things, said:
We have to wade ankle-deep in vile slime to get to our work, school or shops. When we return at night to an unlit hazard we commence a tough commando or survival course and if and when we reach our homes after bumps, falls and bruises we have to engage in a strip-tease act to prevent taking this insanitary muck into our treasured little homes. … Last year, a resident who suffered a heart attack died in hospital after the ambulance crew and local resident had to manhandle him to the ambulance over potholes, ditches and craters.
In another emergency a fire brigade which was answering a call was held up. It took six hours to dig the fire engine out of the mud. There was another instance of an ambulance which could not be driven down the road and a man having to be carried on a stretcher for 200 yards in bad weather.
Perhaps the worst case of this kind was of a woman who was pregnant earlier this year. Suffering from labour pains she summoned the ambulance, which could only get a quarter of the way down the road. She had to walk, or perhaps stumble, would be a more appropriate word, the rest of the way. These are recent examples in just two roads, Saxburga Drive and Augustine Road. These are small parts of one parish, in one rural district of one constituency in the south of England. I shudder to think what the situation must be like in the less civilised parts of the country. I can confirm that my own car shuddered itself when it was driven over some of these roads. One might bear in mind that many sacrifices are made on the uneven paths of political action.
The main part of the Bill would seek to provide powers to require street works authorities to put down a temporary surface, not just for the urgent repairs I


have referred to. It would also provide for appeal to the Minister against the refusal of the local authorities to do so. Initially, the cost would be borne by the frontagers, as with the normal making up of a road, and then the cost of maintaining this temporary surface at that standard would be borne by the highway authority itself.
The danger to be guarded against is that those provisions would not alter the further responsibility of the frontagers, which is to make up the roads properly before they are finally handed over and maintained by the street works authority itself. Many rural districts would like powers themselves to do the work under the existing Act. The Rural District Councils' Association has made repeated representations about this matter, and it is probably another provision which is needed.
This is a very serious problem, a desperate one, affecting the lives of a great many people, and I hope that the House will give leave to bring in this Bill and will facilitate its passage through the House.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Boston, Mr. Blenkinsop, Mr. Ennals, Mr. William Hamilton. Mr. Jackson, Mr. Charles R. Morris, Mr. Murray, Mr. S. C. Silkin, and Mrs. Shirley Williams.

PRIVATE STREET WORKS

Bill to amend the law regarding private street works, presented accordingly and read the First time; to be read a Second time tomorrow and to be printed. [Bill 186.]

CAMPAIGN FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT

4.5 p.m.

Mr. Neil Marten: I beg to move,
That this House regrets the influence which the supporters and policies of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament have upon the Government's policies.
Before I proceed with my Motion, may I say, Mr. Speaker, that I hope that the hon. Gentleman the Member for Ilkeston (Mr. Raymond Fletcher) will recover very quickly and rejoin us after

his collapse. I hope that it was no more than slight.
I have drawn this Motion widely so that we can have a very wide-ranging debate. My reason for choosing this subject was that before the last election, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was "going great guns". While there was a Conservative Government in power, with no Conservative Members of Parliament members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, as far as I am aware, then there was no pressure upon a Conservative Government by the C.N.D. In fact, the C.N.D. policy bounced off the Conservative Government.
Now that there is a Labour Government in power, there are—according to my figures; and calculations are bound to be a little rough, plus or minus a few—just under one-third of the Labour Party who have shown themselves as being sympathetic to the C.N.D. These hon. Members could clearly be quite a pressure group inside the Labour Party, acting upon the Government. This is why I feel that the situation has changed since the last election and why I thought it right that we should take this opportunity to air this subject, in a very friendly way. I do not wish to attack anyone, I want to look at this subject very objectively—[HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear."]—and, apparently, so do some other hon. Gentlemen opposite.
I do not wish to argue that the C.N.D. policy is right, or that the Labour Government policy is right or wrong. That is not my object, because I believe, very firmly, as I am sure most hon. Gentlemen in the House do, that the C.N.D. has the democratic right to say what it likes, to march and to speak. It has the right to carry its banners, to wave its flags and to say what it likes within the law. I would stand up for that right in this House, because that, so far as I am concerned, is what democracy is about.
I do not agree with one word of C.N.D. policy but that is quite by the way. I have constituency organisations connected with C.N.D. and occasionally, I emphasise very occasionally, they send me a resolution, and although I do not agree with what it says it is my duty, as a Member of Parliament, to pass it on to the Foreign Office, and I do so although I do not agree with it.
Within the law, C.N.D. can, and should be able to do what it likes. On 19th April, as some hon. Gentlemen opposite will recall, there was a great march from Aldermaston. I put a Question to the Home Secretary asking how many police were engaged upon, not exactly protecting the C.N.D., but seeing that the C.N.D. came to no harm. As a ratepayer, I was perfectly happy to pay that amount extra to protect the C.N.D. so that it is free to say what it likes. Likewise, it is entitled to have its Members of Parliament. We are at the moment under attack from the hon. Gentleman the Member for West Fife (Mr. William Hamilton), on the ground that certain Members on this side are spokesmen for certain interests. Likewise, on his side of the House, let us face it, some Members of Parliament are spokesmen for C.N.D.

Mr. Ian Mikardo: The difference is that they do not get paid.

Mr. Speaker: I think that we had better not have two hon. Members on their feet at once. I think that we had better stay away from the kind of topic which the Select Committee is considering, and get back to C.N.D., etc.

Mr. Marten: I think that it is clear, from what I have said, that I am a firm democrat in all this. Therefore, I was somewhat shocked when I read my monthly copy of the C.N.D. newspaper, Sanity, and found that our Prime Minister does not take the same view. He is reported in the C.N.D. leader as saying, in his May Day speech:
It is easy to march around with banners demanding this or that.
The right hon. Gentleman criticises members of C.N.D. for doing this. I do not criticise them for doing it.
This newspaper also said that, earlier, the Prime Minister told an Oxford reception that public protestation over Vietnam amounted to political masturbation. That language, if I understand the word aright, coming from the Prime Minister, is rather unbecoming, and I feel that, as it has been printed in this newspaper, if it is incorrect the newspaper should withdraw it, or if it is correct the Prime Minister should offer an explanation.
The leader goes on to say:

When the Prime Minister sneers at M.P.s who sign critical Motions and voters who join protest marchers and carry banners, Harold Wilson is sneering at democracy".
The Prime Minister and I obviously see democracy in different lights.
I may, during this debate, mention one or two Members of Parliament. When one proposes to do so, it is customary to write and tell them in advance. I have written to the Minister of Technology, because I certainly intend to mention him. [HON. MEMBERS: "Where is he?"] However, I should like to explain what I have done about the other hon. Members whom I might mention. I have written to the Government Chief Whip stating:
It is customary to write and inform Members if they are to be mentioned in debate. On Tuesday, I shall be speaking on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. As I have not got the necessary secretarial help to write individually to all the many C.N.D. supporters in the Labour Party, I would be grateful if you could bring this to their notice collectively.

Mr. Frank Allaun: No doubt I am on the list; I am very honoured. The hon. Gentleman referred to the fact that not one hon. Member opposite supports this movement. Does he not think it strange that at a time like this, when, according to the Gallup polls, one in three of the population believes that some initiative of this kind should be taken not one member of the Conservative Party feels this instinct for survival which is affecting so many people throughout the world?

Mr. Marten: This shows the complete sanity of the Conservative Party.
I should like to discuss the C.N.D. policy, which is part of this Motion. I have studied it as best I can and I hope that I will give a fair interpretation of it. If I do not, and if hon. Members think that I am substantially wrong, perhaps they will intervene. But if I am wrong just on the fringes, perhaps they will let it go and, when they catch your eye, Mr. Speaker, perhaps they will be able to clear up the matter. Having discussed the policy, I should like to go on to discuss the influance of C.N.D. in the Labour Party and in the Government.
Before I discuss the policy, may I say that I calculate that about 15 per cent. of the Government has been, or is, connected with C.N.D. I do not know whether they have renounced it. [An


HON. MEMBER: "It may be more."] It may be more, as my hon. Friend says, but about that proportion of the Government sympathise with C.N.D. I should like hon. Members to listen to this quotation from Sanity, the C.N.D. publication, in April, 1965. This is the edition which they carried on the march from Aldermaston. It says:
There has been a change of Government"—

Mrs. Anne Kerr: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Marten: I should like to finish this quotation.
There has been a change of Government since we last marched but little change of policy. Britain still has nuclear weapons despite the fact that some who once marched"—
this is the point—
with us now have Government posts. Perhaps they can exercise their influence from within. We can only exercise ours by marching".

Mrs. Kerr: The march this year was not from Aldermaston. May I put that point forward, because if we are to debate this subject adequately and intelligently we should get our facts right. The hon. Gentleman has made two mistakes of fact.

Mr. Marten: Doubtless I shall be corrected on these fringe points as I go along. I recognise that it was High Wycombe and the bomber base, and that a visiting card was left at Chequers on the way and various other places like that. Perhaps it was not Aldermaston itself.
Having quoted that, I conclude that C.N.D. imagines that it has an overt Trojan horse in the Government working for its policies. Therefore, we have to decide what are its policies. Originally, C.N.D. began by advocating banning the bomb, and so on, but there have since been a variety of changes in its structure, in the personalities who have come in and been thrown out and in the causes which it has espoused, picked up and put down again. I would welcome the comments of C.N.D. Members of Parliament on this, but I would say that C.N.D. policy is an approach to international relations: it has gone much wider than "the bomb". I hope that hon. Members opposite will agree with that. But at base the driving force of the movement is the renunciation

of all nuclear policies. I hope that that is a correct interpretation.
In the policies which I am about to discuss, the front runner at the moment is clearly Vietnam. I will not weary the House with this subject again, because we get daily flashes of C.N.D. from the benches opposite when the Foreign Secretary comes to the Dispatch Box. We try to defend the Foreign Secretary on these occasions. Basically, what C.N.D. wants over Vietnam is to get the United States out of South Vietnam and then to hold free elections, but for Britain, in the meantime, to dissociate herself from the United States. As I understand it, that is what C.N.D. wants.
Early in March this year there was on the Order Paper Motion No. 137, to which the leading signatories were the hon. Members for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman)—predictably—Penistone (Mr. Mendelson), Poplar (Mr. Mikardo), Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer), Putney (Mr. Hugh Jenkins)—he is here, too—and Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Zilliacus)—he is here, too. It is quite a long Motion, as one might expect, but, basically, it said that the Government should publicly and unequivocally declare that they are unable to support the United States in the Vietnamese war. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear."] Hon. Members opposite say, "Hear, hear". That is the opposition to Her Majesty's Government. That Motion was signed by 53 hon. Members and it fits in very much with C.N.D. policy. No Conservative Member signed that Motion.
Our Foreign Secretary has stood very firm in the House and given strong support to United States policy in Vietnam in spite of a battery of Questions and comments, Motions and marches, because I believe that he wants peace, like we want peace. We all want peace, but peace is not a monopoly of C.N.D. Surely the Foreign Secretary knows better than anyone in the Labour Party how difficult are these sorts of peace negotiations.
My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition—

Hon. Members: Where is he?

Sir Arthur Vere Harvey: With the Prime Minister.

Mr. Marten: Doubtless they are discussing nuclear policy together.
I think that all of my hon. Friends agree—perhaps hon. Members opposite do not—that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition was one of the best Foreign Secretaries we have ever had. He said that negotiations for peace needed long and careful preparation if they were to succeed.

Mr. William Hamilton: Like Suez.

Mr. Marten: That is a profound and true remark. Yet we have the spectacle of the Prime Minister virtually plucking out of the air the proposal for a Commonwealth Peace Mission.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour (Mr. Richard Marsh): Is the hon. Gentleman against it?

Mr. Marten: Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will have the opportunity to speak.
The Prime Minister virtually plucked that proposal from the air when he had known for months before that the Commonwealth Prime Ministers would meet. He said himself that this war was likely to escalate. Yet suddenly he plucked this proposal out of the air which had had very little preparation. It is a very fine project in many ways, but what I criticise it for is its timing. The timing was wrong because the proposal had not been prepared. Why was the timing wrong? This is where I come to the terms of the Motion. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear."] I will come to many more terms in the Motion, too.
When the Prime Minister was turning over in his mind this whole problem that faces him, he was acutely aware of the pressures from the Left wing and from the C.N.D. which were building up in this House. Therefore, it suited his convenience, as Leader of the Labour Party, to launch this idea.
I am not saying, I hasten to add, that that is the only reason why the Prime Minister did it. Of course it was not. When one takes a big step like this, there are many reasons which one puts into the scale and then balances. What I am saying is that the C.N.D. Left-wing pressures in this House were so mounting

that this weighed heavily in the Prime Minister's decision, which, I think, was a wrong decision in timing—in timing only. It should have been later, with more preparation. This is one of the justifications for the Motion which I have put down.
Now, we come to the second justification concerning the Vietnam visit by the Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance to Hanoi.

Mr. Philip Noel-Baker: Before the hon. Member leaves his first point, may I put it to him that on timing the right time to propose a Commonwealth Mission is when the Commonwealth Conference is meeting. May I further put to the hon. Member that what was said by the Leader of the Opposition was really an argument for doing nothing and that the Conservative Party always thinks that it is right in a difficulty to do nothing, but that very often to do nothing is a most dangerous course?

Mr. Marten: That was a little more than an intervention. The right hon. Gentleman has, perhaps, missed the point. The Prime Minister knew that the Commonwealth Conference was coming off at least four months previously. He had those four months in which to prepare for this peace move, but he did not. He thought about it only 10 days before. That is my charge, that this was plucked out of the air because of the situation that was arising in this House. Some Members in the House may not agree with that. Others may not like it, others may like it. It is a tribute, indeed, to the pressures of the Left wing.
The next thing which I want to touch upon is this curious mission by the Joint Parliamentary Secretary of the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance to Hanoi. I am not criticising the trip so much as the way that it was plucked out of the air, again without any of the necessary preparation which normally takes place and which could have been done. For example, Mr. Murray, the Foreign Office adviser, was turned back. Had the Joint Parliamentary Secretary left 24 hours later, he would have known that Mr. Murray would not have got his visa. Then, would the Joint Parliamentary Secretary have gone without a Foreign


Office official? That is one for the Government to answer. I hope, however, that in all these manoeuvres that are going on, we do not undermine the confidence of the United States of America in our Government. That is extremely important.

Mr. Hugh Jenkins: Will the hon. Member allow me to intervene? I have to leave the Chamber shortly and I wonder whether the passing mention which is all that the hon. Member has made of my name, in spite of the rather portentous warning which he gave us at the beginning, is all that he will say about me personally, because by the time I return he will have finished his speech.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Sir Samuel Storey): Order. That does not seem to be an intervention for clarification.

Mr. Marten: The answer to the hon. Member's question is that I had not thought of mentioning him.

Mr. Hugh Jenkins: Jolly good.

Mr. Marten: I was talking about the trip to Hanoi of the Joint Parliamentary Secretary of the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. He is a man whom we all like. He is a very agreeable colleague in this House. Nevertheless, it is essential to look at his political background in the light of this mission.
There was an article in the Sunday Telegraph called, "Our man in Hanoi", not, I hope, to be confused with our excellent Consul, Miles Ponsonby, who is there, who happens to be a friend of mine and whose family live in my constituency. This article sets out briefly the background of our man who is, I believe, just leaving Hanoi. It states:
Mr. Davies has taken part in every Left-wing revolt and has been a thorn in the side of his own party leadership. In 1946, he was one of the 15 Labour M.P.s who signed the Keep Left manifesto calling on the Attlee Government to repudiate President Truman's proposal for collective security against Communism, to give up military arrangements with the U.S.A. and to renounce the manufacture of atomic bombs.
In 1947, he was ticked off for sending a telegram of support to the Russian-sponsored Unity Party. In 1948, he was one of those reprimanded for their telegram of support to Pietro Nenni, then taking part in the Communist led-Socialist Alliance in Italy. He opposed Attlee's security check on Communists and Fascists"—

Mr. John Rankin: On a point of order—

The Under Secretary of State for Defence for the Army (Mr. G. W. Reynolds): If the hon. Member—

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Mr. Rankin. A point of order?

Mr. Rankin: Is it in order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, to attack an hon. Member in his absence?

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: There is nothing out of order at all.

Mr. Marten: I was not attacking the Joint Parliamentary Secretary. This is the history of his own actions. I have checked it up with the facts and this is largely true. If there is any—

Mr. William Baxter: On a point of order. In looking at the Motion that is now before the House, I wonder how this attack upon my hon. Friend the Member for Leek (Mr. Harold Davies) comes within its ambit. As far as I am aware, he never was a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I cannot see how the hon. Member for Banbury (Mr. Marten) should be permitted to start discussing my hon. Friend, who is in no way related to the Motion.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: It seems to me that it is entirely related to the Motion, which concerns the effect of the influence of the policies of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament on the policies of the Government.

Mr. H. Hynd: Further to that point of order. The hon. Member has said that he is not attacking my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary. Are we to understand that he is here to bury Caesar and not to praise him?

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: No point of order arises.

Mr. Marten: Thank you, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. I am not attacking the hon. Gentleman. I am explaining to the House his factual background. If hon. Members do not like it—[An HON. MEMBER: "We do."] That is splendid.
The article goes on to say:
His speeches, articles and conference resolutions in favour of withdrawing from


N.A.T.O. and S.E.A.T.O. have been too frequent for individual mention. Besides marching to and from Aldermaston from the start of C.N.D., Mr. Davies has been a regular guest of Left-wing Governments, including those of Russia, China and North Vietnam.
I thought that in the interest of this discussion which we are having today it would be a good thing for the House and the public to be reminded about the man who was sent to Hanoi. I hope that while he has been out there and carrying out his seven-hour marathon teach-in with the civil servants, he has been standing up—

Mr. Norman Buchan: On a point of order. I wonder what the hon. Member thinks he is doing when a member of the Government is away on a dangerous and serious mission. This kind of attack should not be launched in the House of Commons. The hon. Member should withdraw it immediately.

Mr. Marten: I am not attacking. Hon. Members opposite should not be so sensitive about this. I was going on to say—and if the hon. Member had waited he would have heard—that I have every confidence that the hon. Gentleman who has been in Hanoi has, in spite of what I have read out for him, loyally been backing up his right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary and repeating the speech which he made here.

Mr. Eldon Griffiths: Would my hon. Friend not agree that what he has read out about the background of the hon. Member for Leek (Mr. Harold Davies) are his credentials for getting into Hanoi?

Mr. Marten: Well, I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Eldon Griffiths) knows a lot more about this; he wrote an excellent letter to The Times and I am sure that if he catches your eye, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, he will be able to develop the point.
But what we ought really to ask is: why was the hon. Member sent? I believe, as I said before, that there were several factors put into the balance which made the Prime Minister make up his mind to allow him to go, and that one of the balances in the scales—and this is all I am saying, and this is the substance of my Motion—was the pressure

of the Left wing building up in this House.
I see the Prime Minister's dilemma. He has got to keep his Left wing quiet till Parliament goes into Recess in mid-August, or at the end of August, or whenever it is that we shall rise for the Recess. The C.N.D. would not accept that these sorts of actions, like sending the Joint Parliamentary Secretary, are enough, because what the C.N.D. people want is for Britain to dissociate herself from the United States' policy in Vietnam. That is what they want, and as the Prime Minister looks ahead to the misty autumn he sees lying in wait for him the T.U.C. conference, where the subject of Vietnam will come up again. The Transport and General Workers' Union is bound to raise it there. Then there will be the Labour Party conference, where the rank and file of the party are bound to be very noisy about Vietnam and the Prime Minister has got to be seen to have done something about it, and it is that, I think, which has dominated his actions in this respect over Vietnam.
What we all want, of course, is peace.—[Interruption.] All I would say, despite the Paymaster-General—I know I make him sick; I being a member of the Tory Party, he hates my guts, as I think his expression is. But never mind.

The Paymaster-General (Mr. George Wigg): Does the hon. Gentleman want the truth?

Hon. Members: Sit down.

Mr. Marten: All I would say to the right hon. Gentleman is that I am talking about peace, and the true cause of lasting peace will not, I believe, be furthered by any more of these open snubs which this country has received in diplomacy and by the apparent opportunism of the Prime Ministers. I think that these visits will be turned into a Communist propaganda exercise. Indeed, I think that that has already started. I think that in the long run, when, next year, we look back to these months, when they are past, we may see that this has not helped towards peace. So much for the pressures of the Left wing upon the Labour Party over Vietnam.

Mr. Will Griffiths: I give the hon. Member


credit for thinking that he has been serious in his argument so far, but may I put this to him? He said at one point that despite his analysis of how this mission came about, he nevertheless welcomed it, and he thought that the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' initiative was on the whole good and he thinks that the Joint Parliamentary Secretary's visit is on the whole good, despite all his criticisms.
What I want to know from him is this. Despite the criticisms which he has voiced does he really mean that he and his colleagues on the Conservative Front Bench, despite their reservations, desire contact with Hanoi or not? Let us have a serious answer to that question.

Mr. Marten: I am not speaking for these benches. [Laughter.] I can speak only for myself. That must be clear to everyone, despite the laughter from the Paymaster-General. I can only speak for myself.

Mr. Wigg: I should have thought that if the hon. Member is right in that, and even speaking for himself, he is taking on himself a great responsibility, but if the hon. Member impugns the patriotism of my hon. Friend he needs to be reminded that it was not the Labour Party but Captain Ramsay who was interned during the war.

Mr. Marten: I shall not comment on that sort of remark.
I will say to the hon. Member for Manchester, Exchange (Mr. Will Griffiths) that I can only speak for myself. I think that he missed the point, which was that I approve in principle of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Peace Mission, but that I think the timing of it was wrong and that it lacked preparation. That is what I criticise.
I want briefly to go on to the other points in the policy of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I have dealt at length with Vietnam. I will deal with the other ones literally in a sentence each.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament people, with whom I reckon just under one-third of the Labour Party is sympathetic about this, want to abandon our rôle east of Suez. The Government, as we know, wish to keep it. We on this

side shall watch with great interest the defence review, when the results come out, to see to what extent our interests east of Suez have been abandoned. The Atlantic Nuclear Force which the Prime Minister is so keen on canvassing around the world is described by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as a military illusion and nonsense. I think that I have correctly quoted the phraseology from C.N.D.'s leading newspaper—a military illusion and nonsense. Yet the Government are pressing on with it. I want to ask, if the Prime Minister does not succeed in selling this idea, what happens then?
The C.N.D. people want Britain to withdraw from N.A.T.O. and S.E.A.T.O. and CENTO., yet the laughing Paymaster-General knows perfectly well that those three treaties are the cornerstone of our defence. I know that he does not like this, but this is what the C.N.D. people want us to abolish. They are entitled to their views. I just happen to disagree with them.
They want to break up the Anglo-American alliance. They say that our attachment to the United States poisons our relations with the rest of the world.

Mr. Reynolds: rose—

Mr. Marten: No, I have given way to the right hon. Gentleman—

Mr. Reynolds: Will the hon. Member allow me on this point—

Hon. Members: Sit down.

Mr. Marten: I gave way to the right hon. Gentleman, who made an utterly frivolous and irrelevant intervention and I shall not give way any more.

Mr. Reynolds: But I am sure the hon. Gentleman wishes—

Mr. Marten: The hon. Gentleman has the right of reply: I believe that he will be winding up the debate. He can deal then with the point, whatever it is, that he has in mind. I am sorry that I cannot give way to him, but the blame for that is on his right hon. Friend, who wasted the time of the House with the sort of intervention which he made.
The C.N.D. people want us to break up the Anglo-American alliance, to which the Government remain deeply committed—in fact, more deeply committed than


ever. The C.N.D. people want us to abolish—this is in their policy statement—British involvement in the Malaysia-Indonesia war. This is what the C.N.D. people want. They want Britain to withdraw her troops. What purpose would that serve? Whom would that serve? Certainly, it would not serve Britain. Certainly, it would not serve Malaysia. I do trust the Government will not yield on that one.
The C.N.D. people wanted us to end TSR2. TSR2 has been ended. They have achieved their aim, but what they did not bargain for was the fact that the Government are going to America now to buy the F111 to re-equip the Royal Air Force with it, depending more and more upon America for the defence of this country. That is the result of the C.N.D. desire for the TSR2 to be cancelled. We shall watch very carefully, of course, when the Government order the F111, to see whether they order sufficient to give the Royal Air Force a real rôle, or whether they just order a token quantity, in which case they will have once again acceded to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament wants the Polaris bases in Scotland brought to an end. The Prime Minister has said they will be retained. The C.N.D. people want Britain to withdraw from all her overseas bases. We are awaiting the Defence review with great interest to watch to see how far Britain does withdraw. The C.N.D. people want Britain to renounce her nuclear policy, they want her to renounce her nuclear weapons, and they want Britain to end her stockpile of nuclear weapons. That is the sum total, in a nutshell, of what C.N.D. policy is.
That is a very considerable catalogue of Left-wing and C.N.D. demands. Listening to it, I think that none of them would disagree with it, but it is as well that the country and this House should be reminded of what this sum total amounts to. If it was put into operation tomorrow, no one but the Communist bloc would be the gainer. That is precisely what these people want. They want a Britain disarmed, with no overseas bases, neutralised, and with no allies. They are entitled to their views. I do not criticise them for that, but I disagree with them.
I can only conclude that many C.N.D. sympathisers are being duped. Some support C.N.D., or have done, for idealism. Some support it for religious reasons. One hon. Gentleman opposite told me that he marched with it, he saw it, and he resigned from it because it did not fit in with his religious idealism. Some support it from ignorance, and some are just plain muddle-headed, but, after what I have said, I believe that a proportion of the C.N.D. supporters are so Left-wing as to be almost indistinguishable from Communists. I am not criticising them for that, because this is a democracy, and they can have their own beliefs if they want them.
I have put in a nutshell a brief outline of the C.N.D. policy. Just under 100 Members of Parliament on the benches opposite are sympathetic to it. There are members in the Government who, I believe, are sympathetic to it. In fact, I believe that the C.N.D. is more effective in the Labour Party than it is outside in the country. In the country it seems to be a little split. There is the Hampstead Committee of 100, a very militant group. There are the anarchists, who speak for themselves.
There are the people who are trying to make C.N.D. respectable, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, North (Mr. Iremonger), who had an Adjournment debate on this the other day, described them, rather aptly, as rather fly-blown, an expression that we used to come across in the Middle East. That is what the C.N.D. is in the country.
I asked the Foreign Secretary how many letters he had received in protest about Vietnam during the three months up to the end of April. Suprisingly enough, at the time when this great farouche was going on in this House and pressure was really building up, this movement, which is described as a great national one, wrote only 39 letters, three a day, to the Foreign Office. That is an example of the steam being let off in this House, and the organisation outside being a little fly-blown.
Since the election, some Ministers with a C.N.D. background have come into the Government. Not one of them has dissociated himself publicly from his C.N.D. past. None of them has disclaimed his support for it, or the support


that he gave it. It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that they are still sympathetic to the movement, partly I suppose because they are honourable Gentlemen and they hold those views sincerely, passionately and deeply, so they have said. Therefore, when they joined the Government they saw no reason to change those views and declare that they had renounced their past, and they have not done so.
The implication, therefore, is that they still support the C.N.D., and I would remind hon. Gentlemen opposite of what I said earlier about the Trojan horse. The C.N.D. has asked those supporters who can no longer march with it, but who are now in the Government to work for the C.N.D.'s policies, and I want to make my last major point on this.
What is the effect of having, say, three C.N.D. sympathisers in the Cabinet itself? Let us take a notional example of a discussion on a nuclear question. I shall not be more specific than that. If the three C.N.D. members of the Cabinet disagree, they can flounce out of the Cabinet, and the Prime Minister knows what flouncing out of the Cabinet means because he has done it himself. If they flounce out, they will become the focal point around which the Left Wing and the C.N.D. can gather. The Left Wing will then have a leader, which, apparently it does not have at the moment. The Prime Minister recognises this, so he trims his policy in order not to create a situation in which these C.N.D. members of the Cabinet will flounce out. This is a danger which the Prime Minister accepted when he brought them into the Cabinet in the first place.
Who are these people to whom I am referring? I do not want to read long lists, but I have them. Perhaps I might start on the fringe of the Government with the unpaid members, the P.P.S.s. On my list is the P.P.S. to the Prime Minister, and also the P.P.S. to the Foreign Secretary. Both are supporters of the C.N.D. Let it be known that I am not criticising them. One then comes to the next category, the junior Ministers. Among those on my list—he would hate to deny that he was a supporter of the C.N.D.—is the Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport. There is also the hon.

Lady the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland. She is a well-known nuclear disarmer. On my list there is also the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Overseas Development, I think it is.
One then comes to the senior Ministers in the Cabinet, and I suppose the best known is the Secretary of State for the Colonies. I have seen him several times on television. I do not watch television very often, but, two years ago, at Easter time, I saw his handsome face when he was leading the C.N.D. march from Aldermaston. On that occasion he said:
I am implacably opposed to Britain's nuclear strategy and the presence of another nation's nuclear base on our soil.
Let us remind ourselves that he is in the Cabinet. I shall not labour that point.
Next, there is the Minister for Overseas Development, and then one comes to the Minister of Technology. I know that hon. Gentlemen opposite have been waiting for this. The moment has now arrived. I excluded the right hon. Gentleman from my general round robin to the Chief Whip. I wrote a special letter to him saying that during this debate I would be mentioning his name. I am sorry that he is not here, but doubtless he has a much more important engagement.
I have no doubt that the Minister of Technology is a supporter of the C.N.D. Look at the record. At the 1961 Labour Party Conference he proposed a resolution for the complete rejection of any defence policy based on the threat of the use of strategic nuclear weapons. In December, 1961, the Transport and General Workers' Union, of which he was then the paid General Secretary, officially backed the C.N.D. In 1962, he took part in the Aldermaston march, and he wound up in Hyde Park by saying:
Go back to your movement and work for unilateral disarmament.
In 1962, at the Trades Union Congress, the right hon. Gentleman spoke passionately—I have re-read his speech—and called for the removal of United States Polaris bases from Scotland. He spoke deeply, sincerely and passionately about that. How deep was that passion we shall know perhaps in a few weeks' time. In October, 1964, after he had become a Minister, an interview with


him was published in the Sunday papers. I do not know whether the interview was before or after he became a Minister, but that is irrelevant. He said that
one of the most moving experiences every year for the Minister of Technology and his wife Nance was to walk side by side, holding hands, on the Aldermaston march.
I do not criticise him for that. He is entitled to march where he likes, and I think that the picture of him and his wife holding hands is rather nice. I like it. But this right hon. Gentleman is a member of the Government who have a policy in direct contradiction to those C.N.D. sentiments. I want to know where he stands.
Last week, as the public and the House know, the Transport and General Workers' Union passed two resolutions. Let us remember that the Minister of Technology is the General Secretary, and the Transport and General Workers' Union has backed the C.N.D. I hope, therefore, that I am still in order. Last week, the union passed two resolutions, one quite simply urging the Government to dissociate themselves from United States policy in Vietnam—that is the C.N.D. line—and the other opposing the Government's incomes policy. Both are directly contrary—[HON. MEMBERS: "Out of order."] I do not believe that it is out of order. I have not been ruled out of order. Both those resolutions are directly contrary to Labour Government policy.

Mr. William Hamilton: ; On a point of order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. Will it be in order for hon. Members who take part in the debate to discuss the incomes policy as part of the subject matter?

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: A reference to it is not out of order, but we must not discuss it in detail.

Mr. Marten: I am grateful to you, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. I shall not discuss it in detail. I have no need to. Those two resolutions, coming from a C.N.D.-backed union—that puts it in order—are both directly contrary to the Government's policy.

Mr. William Molloy: A C.N.D,-backed union?

Mr. Marten: The hon. Gentleman will find out. If he reads what the union

says, he will realise that its policies are in line with the C.N.D.
Last Thursday, the Prime Minister said:
… on all matters decided by the Government … there is full collective responsibility for all decisions. … All Ministers support the Government's policy on all questions which have been decided."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 8th July, 1965; Vol. 715, cc. 1807–8.]
That is very clear and very proper. I have here a book by Sir Ivor Jennings, called "Cabinet Government". On page 281, Sir Ivor says:
Cabinet Ministers are expected not merely not to oppose a Cabinet decision, but also to support it.
On page 277, he says:
A Minister who is not prepared to defend a Cabinet decision must, therefore, resign.
I am talking about the Minister of Technology because, on Saturday, I opened my copy of The Times—[HON. MEMBERS: "Ah."] I know what the "Ahs" and arguments will be about it, that he probably did not say it and so on. But if the right hon. Gentleman did not say what he was reported to have said, why has he not denied it? Instead of coming out in support of his Government, as, according to this book on constitutional matters, he should have done, he was reported in The Times in this way:
The Minister of Technology expressed his delight that the Conference had registered some firm views on some matters of real concern.
What are those matters of real concern? There were two matters of real concern to this country before that conference, namely, Vietnam and the incomes policy. Whatever legalistic little wriggle the right hon. Gentleman tries to use or his hon. Friends try to use to dodge out of it, we all know that he was, in fact, referring to both those issues, and, of course, he was endorsing what his union had said. He was not backing up his own Government, according to constitutional history, and I therefore call for his resignation. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] I am not criticising the Minister—[Laughter.] Wait for it. I am not criticising the Minister of Technology at this moment for his views of on Vietnam, or for his views on the incomes policy. He is entitled to those views. But what I do criticise him for—this is a serious point—is speaking with two voices.
As a result of all this, the right hon. Gentleman has little respect left on this side of the House. There is little honour left in his politics. But what really matters about his performance is the effect on the good name of politics of behaving in this way. I know that the right hon. Gentleman finds attendance in the House difficult at this moment. I am quite certain that that is why he is away now. But, had he been here, I should have asked him five questions. He is not here, but I shall, nevertheless, ask him those questions, because I am sure that he will read HANSARD and, to cover the matter, I shall later this week write an open letter repeating these five questions and hope to have an open reply because we are anxious and concerned when a Cabinet Minister speaks with two voices.
The five questions are these. Does the Minister of Technology now agree with the United States Polaris base remaining in Scotland? Does he now agree with the build-up of our arsenal of Polaris missiles? Does he agree with the retention of our nuclear force and our stockpile of nuclear weapons? Does he agree with the Transport and General Workers' Union resolution on Vietnam or with his Government's policy on Vietnam? Does he agree with the Transport and General Workers' resolution on the incomes policy or with his Government's policy?

Mr. Mikardo: Very clever.

Mr. Marten: Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman will answer these clever questions, as the hon. Gentleman calls them. Perhaps he will answer the last one in the debate on technology tomorrow. I think that it would be in order to do so, and I sincerely hope that he will.
Hon. Members opposite will be glad to know that I am coming to an end. I hope I have made the point that the Left wing and the C.N.D. have got an influence on this Government, and they will continue to have an influence so long as they are in the Labour Party. I must say that, if I were a member of the C.N.D., I should be proud of what it has achieved. It has achieved a degree of—I do not mean it in a nasty way—influence in the Labour Party which is a great credit to the subtlety with which it

has proceeded. It puts the train robbers' escape organisation to the shade.
Finally, I throw out this challenge to the C.N.D. I disagree with the C.N.D. and its policies, but I think that, in the interests of democracy, we should all know quite clearly where everyone stands and how big the C.N.D. movement is in this country. The C.N.D. should put up its own parliamentary candidates, in selected places if it likes, to test how much it is supported. More than that, I challenge all Labour Members of Parliament who are supporters of the C.N.D. to stand at the next election as "Labour and C.N.D."

4.58 p.m.

Mr. K. Zilliacus: I am grateful to the hon. Member for Banbury (Mr. Marten) for initiating this debate and for drawing his Motion in terms wide enough to enable us to get to the heart of the problem. I shall not, however, follow him into all the ramifications of what he said because I think that he did rather anticipate the foreign affairs debate next week. I shall try to stick to the C.N.D. and its relation to the Labour Party.
The hon. Gentleman is perfectly right in saying that there is a great deal of overlapping between the C.N.D. and the Left of the Labour Party. A good many members of the C.N.D. are members of the Labour Party. Many leaders of it are leading figures in the Labour Party. But basically, the C.N.D. is a non-party movement, an organised moral protest against the prospect of genocide by the use of nuclear weapons. It is true that it has broadened into a general approach to international affairs, but, in my view, one of the faults and weaknesses of the C.N.D. is that it has stuck too closely to the issue of nuclear weapons, which I regard as a symptom rather than a cause of something basically wrong in the whole of our post-war policy.
However, I will not go into that, because that belongs to the realm of foreign affairs. I want to stick to the field which the C.N.D. has made peculiarly its own, where I believe it has rendered a signal service to the nation, and I am only sorry that, partly owing to its own faults, its influence has not been greater on the policies of the Government, let alone those of the Opposition. Unfortunately,


the handful of Conservative C.N.D. supporters have had no influence on their party leaders.
I will state what I regard as the basic issue, not in terms of what the C.N.D. said, but in terms of what an illustrious leader of the Labour Party said from the Front Bench when he was Shadow Foreign Secretary. That was the late Aneurin Bevan, who said in the House on 20th February, 1958:
I do not believe that the possession of the hydrogen bomb is worth while from the point of view of negotiation … An instrument of suicide can never be an instrument of negotiation."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 20th February, 1958; Vol. 582, c. 1409.]
I would also quote what one of the founders of N.A.T.O., G. F. Kennan, at that time head of the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. State Department, said in his broadcast Reith Lectures in November-December, 1959:
The weapon of mass destruction is a sterile and hopeless weapon … which cannot in any way serve the purposes of a constructive and hopeful foreign policy. The suicidal nature of this weapon renders it unsuitable both as a sanction of diplomacy and as the basis of an alliance.
A little earlier, on 23rd July, 1957, again in the House, Aneurin Bevan put what I thought was the real issue as a lot of us in the Labour Party understand it and on which the C.N.D. has done a good deal to educate public opinion. He said:
Ordinary men and women are becoming impatient of all of us when we are dealing with this problem. The fact is—let us face it—that most of the speeches that are made on both sides of the Committee on this subject"—
that is, of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrent strategy, the ideological conflict, and the rest of it—
make no sense at all to ordinary men and women. … The fact is that the ends which are served by national defence and the means adopted for defence are so far apart from each other today as to add up to no sense at all. No one really believes that weapons which are weapons of mutual suicide are any longer means of national self-defence. We can talk about the subject as much as we like, but that is how the ordinary man and woman look at it. … It just makes no sense.
The other day I heard a railwayman say that, having tried to follow the discussions on the subject on the radio, he had been reduced to the situation that he would now rather be defeated in a conventional war than victorious in a nuclear war, because, he said, 'I should be alive maybe to endure

the one, but I should not be alive to rejoice over the other.'
May I remind the House that in the last defence debate on 4th March, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Defence observed that within three days of the outbreak of a nuclear war, life would be extinct on this island. That is not an unimportant point, which the C.N.D. is striving in vain to draw to the attention of the party opposite.
Aneurin Bevan went on:
If we abandoned flatulent generalisations about the wide differences that separate the Soviet system from our own, most hon. Members would privately agree with that opinion. There cannot be any differences about social systems so profound that we are prepared to run the risk of wiping out the whole of human society over them. … After all, the primary condition for arguing about different social systems is that one should be alive to argue about them. But if the argument results in the extinction of all social systems, it seems rather absurd to be worrying about which particular one one is going to live under."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 23rd July, 1957; Vol. 574, c. 334.]
The C.N.D. has had, I think, a substantial success in the course of time in making public opinion aware of this literally vital, in the sense of life and death, truth. In proof of that, I should like to point out that some years ago my own party, I am sorry to say, officially took the same line as the party opposite is still taking; that is, it believed in the mythology of the British independent deterrent. There was a semiofficial pamphlet published at that time, the author of which was John Strachey, which argued the case for it in very much the same terms as the argument is still being put forward from the other side. The author clinched his argument by pointing out that a Gallup poll in 1958 had shown that,
by a majority of no less than three to one the British people were against Britain scrapping the hydrogen bomb on her own. If the Labour Party adopted such a policy it would neither receive nor deserve the confidence of the British people.
Between 1958 and 1964, quite a process of education went on, powerfully aided by the failure of the Blue Streak missile. However, those changes and developments in the situation had passed by the party opposite, and the Prime Minister at the time of the last election chose to make a central issue in his election campaign of the retention of the so-called independent British deterrent. As a result,


he is today the Leader of the Opposition and likely to remain so until his loyal supporters can agree on a successor without an unseemly brawl.
It was not because he had not had warnings. There was for instance, the warning of the Sunday Telegraph in July, 1963. It had a sad little editorial entitled, "Nuclear Boomerang", and pointed out that a recent Gallup poll showed that 24 per cent. took the straight C.N.D. position on nuclear weapons, about a third took the Lib-Lab position of renouncing British bombs and relying on American bombs, which I regard as an illogical half-way house, and less than two-fifths supported the Conservative make-believe pseudo-Gaulism about an independent British deterrent made in the United States.
The Times, a few months later, concluded a nation-wide survey of the position of the electorate on the issues coming before them in the election and said, in an article published on 16th February, 1964:
It is argued that the defence issue may sway many votes to the Conservatives. If so, the feeling has yet to be aroused in the areas I visited: compared with 1962, the uncommitted middle class voter is much more likely to argue today that the so called independent deterrent is neither independent nor a deterrent. So many people have a deep-seated loathing of the bomb.
Then came the historic debate on 16th and 17th December, when my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister mercilessly dispatched the myth of the independent British deterrent and, in the words of the hon. Member for Devon, North (Mr. Thorpe), on television:
Chewed up the right hon. Leader of the Opposition into very small fragments and left them strewn on the carpet.
But there is no sign that this lesson has sunk in, nor even that the remark of The Times subsequently has been taken to heart, namely that it was time the Tory Party gave up the charade and faced reality. As far as I can make out, the Leader of the Opposition, who is blessedly free from any C.N.D. influences, sticks to the point he made in another place on 26th June, 1963, when he was Foreign Secretary. He said:
We are the sole judges … as to when, if at all, we might want to use our own deterrent in the supreme national interest.

which apparently does not include staying alive.
This is a recognition of the fact that we are a world Power and that threats to our vital interests might occur outside Europe and outside the N.A.T.O. area."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, House of Lords, 26th June, 1963; Vol. 251, c. 278–9.]
This was expanded in an article in the Conservative Central Office weekly newsletter on 11th January last year, which pointed out that we might feel it necessary to resort to force to preserve our interests if they were threatened in some corner of the world, that we might then be threatened with nuclear weapons unless we gave up this resort to conventional forces, and the Americans might be unwilling to sacrifice their cities and population to support us, and that unless we had nuclear weapons of our own we should then have to submit to the nuclear blackmail of the other side.
What that means is that Britain, which is in American terms a 2 per cent. nuclear Power and in Soviet terms perhaps a 6–8 per cent. nuclear Power, would be undeterred by a deterrent more than ten times as great as ours, but we would face the other side and expect to impose our nuclear blackmail on it. Honestly, that kind of thing strikes me as rather remote from reality or even from sanity.
But perhaps I am a little unjust in my summary of the position of the party opposite and its leaders, though it seems to me a perfectly fair summary. At any rate, I hope it will not be denied that the Leader of the Opposition, whom the hon. Member for Banbury described as the best Foreign Secretary we have had, is slightly old-fashioned in his approach to the problems of Britain in the age of nuclear weapons and the ideological conflict. I am thinking, of course, of a pamphlet which he wrote on British foreign policy when he was Foreign Secretary. It was issued by the Conservative Central Office in April, 1961. It began with the following most impressive and striking passage:
Palaeolithic man, dressed in his skin and armed with his club, had two main jobs: to protect his family from its foes and to hunt for the family's food supplies. When I took over the Foreign Office it seemed to me that, despite the lapse of time, the needs of man had changed very little and that the functions of the Foreign Secretary were very close to those of his Stone Age ancestors.


After reading that remarkable passage I fell into a reverie and conjured up a vision of the right hon. Gentleman hunting the nation's food supplies armed with his independent deterrent. Seriously, I do not think it can be denied that this approach is slightly behind the times—roughly about 10,000 years.
The appalling thing is that I believe that the right hon. Gentleman really believes this. When he addressed the Young Conservatives on 15th February, 1964, he said:
I must tell them where British safety and the prospect of peace really lies. It is not in some woolly Socialist get-together, where all agree on a pink peaceful coexistence. It is in an overwhelming deterrent to war.
That is "overwhelming" meaning 2–8 per cent. of what the other side has, on the "go it alone" principle, to which the right hon. Gentleman adheres.
I am disappointed with and critical of the policy of my own Government. I do not think that they go nearly far enough. But I am hopeful that they will evolve, and I am glad that they are taking initiatives and trying. The idea that really fills me with black despair is the thought that in some moment of aberration the people of this country might be insane enough once more to entrust their leadership to an Old Etonian Neanderthaler and the political primitives who shamble out of their caves, and jump up and down and bark approval of his Stone Age sentiments.
As for the C.N.D., I say that those concerned in it are an honour to the youth of this country. They show that there are young people who care desperately about the future of the human race, who object to being slaughtered by their purblind and insane elders. They are people who make a moral protest. They are people who care. I can assure hon. and right hon. Gentlemen on both sides of the House that they have made a deep impression on the public opinion of the world. The symbol of the C.N.D. has spread throughout the world. It is the symbol of marchers in many lands.

Mr. Marten: Will the hon. Gentleman say how many marches take place in, for example, Russia, protesting against Russian missile bases in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania?

Mr. Zilliacus: In any case, I am concerned with the so-called free world. The whole idea of this protest is to say that we do not need nuclear weapons to regulate our relations with the other side, and whether they have marches there or not is quite irrelevant to the question.

Mr. Marten: Is the hon. Gentleman implying that Russia is not a free country?

Mr. Zilliacus: Of course it has not political freedom in our sense, but it wants peace, and that is the point. I am sick of this hypocrisy about political freedom from people who support the revolting dictatorship in Vietnam or the evil dictatorships set-up elsewhere by the Americans, or who appeased Hitler and Mussolini before the war. I am certain that the Tory Party cares nothing at all for the defence of democracy and freedom in other countries. The best we can hope for is some respect for democracy in this country.

Mr. R. T. Paget: My hon. Friend says that he is convinced that Russia wants peace. Is that why the Rusisans have nuclear armaments?

Mr. Zilliacus: Considering that the United States has a four-to-one superiority of nuclear arms over the Soviet Union, which forbore to build more when it could have done so, considering that the Russians have offered again and again policies of peaceful co-existence, which, incidentally, coincide with the policies on which the Labour Party was returned to power and on which we could negotiate an agreement, and remembering the Americans are the people who have not accepted peaceful co-existence and who are still pursuing an anti-Communist crusade which is assuming genocidal forms in Vietnam at the moment, I think that that question is somewhat irrelevant.
Finally, what C.N.D. stands for is the idea that the people should take a hand in the settlement of their affairs. It was Clemenceau who said that war was too serious a matter to be entrusted to generals. I believe that peace is too serious a matter to be entrusted to politicians. In the C.N.D., and for the rank and file of the Labour Party, through the trades unions, and at the annual party conference, we have a


manifestation of what the people think about these issues of peace and war. I am glad that the Labour Government are open to the influence of these currents and these feelings of the people. I am glad that the debate is showing that the one party which is utterly isolated from these feelings is the Tory Party, which is the party which stands for the cold war and the arms race until the bombs come home.

The Second Clerk Assistant at the Table informed the House of the unavoidable absence of Mr. SPEAKER from the remainder of this day's Sitting.

Whereupon Dr. HORACE KING, The CHAIRMAN OF WAYS AND MEANS, took the Chair as DEPUTY-SPEAKER, pursuant to the Standing Order.

5.18 p.m.

Mr. Cranley Onslow: The speech that we have just heard from the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Zilliacus) had a somewhat familiar ring. It seemed to repeat most of what had been said by him in practically every foreign affairs debate in which he has spoken, as well as to anticipate what he will no doubt say in the next foreign affairs debate in which he takes part.
The speech was constructed very largely from carefully chosen and selected quotations. It was a sort of patchwork of comments taken out of context, to which the answer could, I believe, well be contained in yet one other quotation from the late Aneurin Bevan, when he said that he was not prepared to see the Foreign Secretary of this country go naked into the conference chamber, a quotation for which he is likely to be remembered much longer than the hon. Member for Gorton for anything which he has said now or on previous occasions.

Mr. Zilliacus: I knew that this would be coming. That speech by Aneurin Bevan was one of the most unfortunate and unsuccessful that he ever made. He delivered it in an attempt to rally the party behind the official policy at Brighton. In a later speech, in February, 1958—which I quoted—he took back all of that and said that one could not use the H-bomb in negotiations.

Mr. Onslow: I will concede to the hon. Gentleman that, unlike some leaders of the Labour Party at the moment, the late Aneurin Bevan was sometimes big enough to admit that he might be wrong.
This is not an attack by us on the C.N.D. and its supporters. Many hon. Members on this side of the House are grateful to the local chapters or whatever they are for the constant support they give to us and the way in which they enliven our election meetings. This is an attack on the Government as a whole and the Prime Minister in particular for allowing supporters of C.N.D., knowing what their policy is, to serve in his Administration and unduly influence the policy of the Government.
They have done so already, particularly in the case of the TRS2. This will not be forgotten in a hurry. It may interest the Paymaster-General, who is having his usual giggle, that I am wearing a tie given to me by some of my constituents who worked for the British Aircraft Corporation on the TSR2. This is the emblem of those who worked on the machine. The tie is black in mourning for the TSR2, killed by the Government, and the Government are portrayed, I imagine, by the yellow streak in the tie.
The substance of the Motion depends upon what is known of the attitudes and efforts of supporters of C.N.D. I have no wish to repeat at length the points already made by my hon. Friends. I do not wish to refer at all to the views of the right hon. Member for Nuneaton (Mr. Cousins). He is having a bad enough week. Let us give him a moment of peace. I want particularly to quote from some remarks made in the past by another member of the Government, the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, the hon. Lady the Member for Lanark (Mrs. Hart). I have notified her that I would mention her name and she has thanked me for so doing. I am sure that she is occupied by some important business elsewhere.
The hon. Lady, now a member of the Government, is no longer a member of the Committee of C.N.D. nor, I understand, of the Anti-Apartheid Committee. We have no reason to suppose—and I know of no statement by her to suggest it—that her resignation came because she disagreed with the views of these two bodies. It is, however, worth mentioning


that she still remains as vice-chairman of the Movement for Colonial Freedom—a body with which the Prime Minister was connected and whose chairman is Lord Brockway, who is also chairman of the British Council for Peace in Vietnam. One of the sponsors of this Council is—surprise, surprise—the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
This merry-go-round reveals one thing which may strike hon. Members, and that is the monopolistic tendencies of the British protest industry. They are all interconnected, with interlocking directorships. There is the Movement for Colonial Freedom, C.N.D. and the Anti-Apartheid Committee, and no doubt the next 16 protest movements to spring up spontaneously will all be interlocking with these three movements. We shall have the same old names again.

Mr. Bernard Floud: Would the hon. Gentleman make clear whether or not he is in favour of apartheid?

Mr. Onslow: I am not a member and I have no intention of belonging to the Anti-Apartheid Movement. [HON. MEMBERS: "Answer the question."] That does not mean that I am in favour of apartheid. I am not in favour of apartheid. But I will not lend my name—and others would do well to consider this—in favour of a cause in which I believe to an organisation which will exploit it cynically for purposes to our detriment and danger.

Mrs. Anne Kerr: rose—

Mr. Onslow: No. I shall never get on. We are aware of the hon. Lady's views. I want to quote what has been said by the hon. Lady the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland in the past. In 1960, at a C.N.D. rally in Glasgow, she said:
What we are demanding is that Britain by giving up nuclear weapons should be allowed to exercise her influence in bringing about unilateral disarmament.
In 1961, at a Labour Party conference, she said:
Through the use of Polaris missiles Britain is inviting obliteration without representation.

Mr. Mikardo: Perfectly true.

Mr. Onslow: In 1962, at the time of the Cuba crisis, the hon. Lady said:
Britain should make it clear that we were not willing to be militarily committed on the side of America whatever happened in Cuba.

In 1963, she said:
We must cease forthwith the attempt to remain an independent nuclear power. We should seek to ensure that N.A.T.O. itself is not dependent on nuclear stategy. This would involve the abandonment of any attempt to create a European nuclear deterrent in any form and the removal of American bases in Britain.

Hon. Members: Hear, hear.

Mr. Onslow: I note the approval of hon. Members opposite. All these are points of view that the hon. Lady is entitled to express but it is notable, of course, that the Government have not yet given up nuclear weapons—and so far they show no sign of intending to do so They do not seem to have taken any particular steps towards not acquiring polaris submarines. They do not seem to have become any less committed to America whatever happens in Vietnam. They do not seem, in particular, to be anxious to hasten the demise of N.A.T.O. which the hon. Lady in 1963 was so anxious to see.

Mr. Mikardo: I am trying hard to follow the hon. Gentleman's argument. He seems to be saying two contrary things. First, he points out that the Government have not followed the views of my hon. Friend the 'Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, thereby arguing that the supporters of C.N.D. who are in the Government have had no influence on the Government. Why, therefore, is the hon. Gentleman speaking in support of a Motion which complains that they have influence on the Government?

Mr. Onslow: I shall be delighted to to explain. The hon. Gentleman is not showing his customary patience and restraint. I have already said that I believe the cancellation of the TSR2 was a direct result of the influence of C.N.D. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh".]. I believe that to be so. It is a point of view and I am just as entitled to it as others are entitled to disagree. I mention these points to show what influence the C.N.D. has and to show what its supporters may well be able to do in persuading the Government to do what they want so long as they remain in the Cabinet.
Let us get this plain. The C.N.D. policy is quite comprehensive. The dynamic and instant reactionaries opposite have only had a few short months to bring their influence into play and we must consider what is to come. We have


seen what has already come—the cancellation of the TSR2 and the way in which the proper balance of diplomatic negotion in South-East Asia has been upset by pressures from C.N.D.

Mr. Emlyn Hooson: When the Conservative Government cancelled Blue Streak, was that the result of the influence of C.N.D?

Mr. Onslow: Even for an hon. Member sitting on that bench I find that rather a silly question.

Mr. Wigg: Answer it.

Mr. Onslow: I know how anxious many hon. Members opposite are to have time to express their views. I will not be provoked by the right hon. Gentleman the Paymaster-General into wasting time. I want to talk seriously about the British Council for Peace in Vietnam, whose chairman is Lord Brockway.
A leaflet, distributed at a meeting in Glasgow on 30th June, 1965, when the speakers included the hon. Member for Glasgow, Woodside (Mr. Carmichael) and the hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Michael Foot), said:
Progressive people throughout the world, outraged by U.S. actions, have condemned the U.S. war. De Gaulle too has made his opposition clear.
Hon. Members will note the somewhat interesting distinction there.
But to Britain's shame the Labour Government has from the outset backed the U.S. action to the full.
Never in recent years have British statesmen been so servile, such stooges, to the U.S.
Wilson and Stewart kow-tow to the American Government over Vietnam, because they want U.S. support for the colonial war in Malaysia.
This leaflet was distributed at a meeting called by the British Council for Peace in Vietnam one of whose sponsors is the C.N.D. On this occasion I must absolve the C.N.D. directly, because this leaflet—and hon. Members opposite will be surprised to hear this—was published by the Communist Party.

Mr. Neil Carmichael: rose—

Mr. Onslow: I will not give way.

Mr. Carmichael: I am the hon. Member for Woodside.

Mr. Onslow: In that case, I will give way.

Mr. Carmichael: This was a meeting called by Tribune and many leaflets were handed out outside the meeting. I do not know that leaflet myself, but many leaflets are handed out at many meetings all over the country. The people inside a meeting do not necessarily agree with those who happen to be distributing the leaflets outside.

Mr. Onslow: I accept that this was a meeting about Vietnam, but the leaflet was headed:
Join the National Lobby to Parliament. Called by the British Council for Peace in Vietnam.—(Chairman Lord Brockway.)
The C.N.D. is a sponsor of the British Council for Peace in Vietnam, as is the Communist Party, and my point in mentioning the leaflet is to stress the danger—

Mr. Eric S. Heffer: rose—

Mr. Onslow: I think that I will continue.

Mr. Heffer: It is a smear.

Mr. Onslow: I know how anxious hon. Members opposite are to distort my views, but on this occasion I am not suggesting that those who hold the views of the C.N.D., or the Communist Party, or even the Socialist Party are necessarily fools or knaves. That is not my case. My case is that we must know what views are held and we must know why it is that those who hold those views are yet given the positions which they now have.
To digress for a moment, I would attack the Government's economic advisers not because they come from Hungary, or have children in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but because their views are mistaken and wrong and dangerous for this country and because they should not be employed by a Government of this country. I hope that hon. Members opposite will listen to that and will stop trying to divert the force of our attacks on gentlemen of this kind by smearing our arguments.

Mr. Archie Manuel: rose—

Mr. Onslow: No. I have already taken longer than I intended and it would be


only fair to allow hon. Members opposite to compete to catch your eye in due course, Mr. Deputy-Speaker.
Why do we have in the Government known supporters of the C.N.D.? Because the Prime Minister put them there. Why did he put them there? Because he shares their views? Because he sees the force of the criticisms which they level against him? Because it was expedient that he should do so? Because he is practising some duplicity? Why? "You pays your money and you takes your choice"—a four-way accumulator, or whatever it is. We do not know the answer and we should like to know it.
The present situation destroys the Government's credibility at home and overseas. It undermines the confidence of our allies in the British Government's intentions in South-East Asia. It may well undermine the confidence of those with whom we have to negotiate in the firmness with which the Government will hold to the opinions which the Foreign Secretary has publicly expressed. This situation is dangerous to us all.
Finally, in the House of Commons we have and we know we have a number of Members who are supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Mr. Manuel: And a few Fascists, too.

Mr. Onslow: But looking across the Chamber I cannot see anyone who is displaying his badge. The advice which we should give to hon. Members who support the C.N.D. and to members of the Cabinet who support the C.N.D. is, "Wear your badge; fly your colours; let us see you. What are you afraid of? Are you afraid that you are wrong? Are you afraid that you have an influence which you would lose if your colours were truly known?" That is the challenge. [Interruption.] I am delighted to see that the hon. Lady the Member for Rochester and Chatham (Mrs. Anne Kerr) has accepted the challenge and has shamed her male colleagues. Perhaps other hon. Members opposite will be able to go out of the Chamber and get their badges in a minute. I hope that other and more eminent hon. Members will answer this challenge. Let us see them at the next Cabinet meeting showing these nice little badges—

Mr. Eric Ogden: On a point of order. So far as

I can see, the suggestion is that those who are not wearing badges on this side of the House are not wearing them because they are ashamed of a certain membership of a certain party. I happen to be wearing my badge. Will the hon. Gentleman take back that slur?

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: That is not a point of order.

Mr. Onslow: I am sorry that my eyes deceived me as I looked across the Chamber and led me to malign the hon. Member. I gladly accept his confession that he is a member of the C.N.D.
I repeat: let them come into the open; let them come out of the Cabinet room and be photographed outside No. 10 wearing their badges, and then we shall not need to have another Motion like this for a long time, because the fresh air of the publicity will put an end to what might otherwise well become a sinister and dangerous conspiracy.

5.38 p.m.

Mr. Maurice Edelman: The last time I followed the hon. Member for Woking (Mr. Onslow) I congratulated him on his maiden speech. I am sorry that I cannot congratulate him this time. His speech was contemptible and followed the general tone, the general ignoble and somewhat squalid tone, with which the debate was initiated by the hon. Member for Banbury (Mr. Marten). I say that because the whole of the debate has been conceived and developed in a mood of chicanery. As we all know, it was the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. John Hall) who won the Ballot and who should have introduced a debate on Europe. Hon. Members opposite pay lip-service to the idea of a united Europe.

Mr. Marten: rose—

Mr. Manuel: He did not give way to me. Do not give way.

Mr. Edelman: There was an opportunity for the House to discuss the vitally important matter of Europe, which is especially important at this moment where there seemed to be so many divisive tendencies in Europe itself. Despite that, hon. Members opposite threw away the opportunity to debate Europe in order to engage in a debate which I probably over-value by describing as one of the worst examples of malevolence which I


have heard in this Chamber in the 20 years that I have been a Member of the House.
The hon. Member for Banbury is the victim of a kind of political schizophrenia. Personally, I find him a most amiable person. I have played tennis with him and, as a junior Minister, he always showed himself able to appreciate matters objectively. He is a person who has not one but two King Charles's heads—the Paymaster-General and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He has propounded those two themes in the course of many debates.
Today I was bitterly disappointed in the mood, attitude and form in which he expressed himself, because his references to supporters, past and present, of C.N.D. reminded me of nothing more than the McCarthy technique of spreading guilt by association. What is that technique? It is the vague allegation; the miasma of suspicion; the attribution of base motives; the designation of the unpopular as the villainous. That is the technique of McCarthyism, and I thought it remarkable that not only was this tone set by him in his introduction but it was immediately followed by his hon. Friend.

Mr. Marten: This is not McCarthyism, because they are proud of it. McCarthyism was rather the opposite. It was uncovering Communism. This is explaining what is quite on the surface, and is well known, because the newspaper published by C.N.D. contains lists of all the people who support it.

Mr. Edelman: The hon. Member should not have wasted the time of the House by that interruption. The essence of McCarthyism is the attribution of guilt by association. The essence of McCarythism is to create a vague aura of suspicion and then to ask those who are accused to deny that they are people who are guilty of a crime of which they were not guilty in the first place. That is the essence of the technique of McCarthyism, and that is the technique which the hon. Member and his follower used today. That is what the whole House must deplore.
If we are to use that technique in this House—I say this not as a threat but with deep regret—it will be possible for all sorts of people to use the technique of

the attribution of guilt of all kinds to hon. Members. It is a characteristic of this honourable House not to conduct its debates in this way. I profoundly regret that on this occasion the debate should have been initiated in this form. I tell the hon. Member not only was he prepared to deliver this attack against hon. Members on this side of the House—[Interruption.] He now says that he did not attack, but it seems to me that the method he used was, in the words of the poet, such that he was
willing to strike but afraid to wound.
Why was he afraid to wound? It was because he knew that if he wounded too much the reposte would be so sharp that many hon. Members opposite—including himself—would not recover from it.

Captain Walter Elliot: The hon. Member has accused my hon. Friend of using the technique of McCarthyism. As I understand it, McCarthyism dealt with Communism. [HON. MEMBERS: "It did not."] This debate is about C.N.D.

Mr. Mikardo: That is the one thing McCarthyism did not do.

Captain Elliot: Is the hon. Member suggesting that both are the same—or is there a smear attached to association with C.N.D.?

Mr. Edelman: The hon. Member is seconding his friend in his McCarthyism technique. He is doing precisely the same by equating the two things. He is asking the rhetorical question whether I associate membership of C.N.D. with membership of the Communist Party. That is putting it simply for him. The answer is that I do not, as I shall show in the course of my remarks. I re-emphasise that to try to smear an issue which is and should be clear by suggesting that hon. Members who supported the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were Communists—because that is what it is, put baldly—is an unworthy smear and a lie.

Mr. Marten: rose—

Hon. Members: No. You spoke for an hour.

Mr. Edelman: At this stage, after my preamble, I should like to say a few words about myself. I marched twice at Aldermaston, and I am glad that I did.


The march was a demonstration of political and moral protest in the great tradition not just of the Labour movement but of all those movements of popular protest throughout British history when the people have come to lead the Governments. The first march was only one step. The nuclear disarmers in their time instructed the whole nation and the whole world. They protested against the bomb being considered as an instrument of war. They created a climate of opinion in which Governments agreed to abandon nuclear testing with which they were polluting the atmosphere. They created a mood in which Britain recognised that the world's peril grew rather than diminished with the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
My part in the genesis of the campaign was to give my name as a sponsor and to march with those who went to Aldermaston. I took no part in its direction, and I withdrew my name after a relatively short time simply because I was not prepared to sponsor a movement whose direction appeared to me to be arbitrary and whose policies later on went beyond its original terms of reference. Nor did I believe, in the developing context of world events, that uni-laterialism was practical politics. In a world where the bomb was multiplying it seemed to me that only concerted action by the bomb owners could save the world from the doom to which seemed to be hurrying.
In a sense I could be described as a premature multilateralist. I do not want to quote my own speeches—I do not think that I have ever done so in this House—but I hope that I may refer to a speech that I made on 5th November, 1953, because it illustrates my own concern with the bomb and my own motives for marching to Aldermaston. No doubt the hon. Member for Banbury will do me the honour of reading my speech in full. When I spoke I had just returned from the United States, where I had heard of the hydrogen bomb and its potentialities, and also that the Soviet Union was about to explode a hydrogen bomb. I had heard of Professor Einstein's statement that with the development of the hydrogen bomb the
radio-active poisoning of the atmosphere and hence annihilation of any life on earth has

been brought within the range of technical possibility.
I then said:
I wished to try to discover what was meant by * poisoning the atmosphere'."—
In 1953 this was a fairly novel concept—
Apparently it means that following the explosion of a hydrogen bomb tremendous quantities of neutrons which can enter any substance in nature, are liberated and can make these substances radioactive. According to the published statements of leading scientists who have taken part in the development of the atomic bomb, if a cobalt casing is used for a bomb of adequate size it would be possible … for all life on earth to be destroyed by these radio-active substances.
Then I quoted the late Professor Szilard, whom I had met shortly after the war—one of the leading scientists responsible for the development of the atomic bomb—who had said:
Four hundred tons of heavy hydrogen or deuterium could produce 50 tons of neutrons which, in turn, could generate a radio-active element capable, if released in the air, of surviving for five years, killing the whole of mankind.
In those days all that seemed like science fiction, and too remote for anybody to know anything about. When I spoke in this sense I was heard with a certain detachment by those hon. Members who were present. I went on to say:
it is illusory to imagine that there exists any absolute form of protection against the atomic and the hydrogen bomb, and any country which imagines that it can with immunity take part in a war with which such weapons of mass destruction will be used is living in a fool's paradise. We in this country know how exposed we are. It may be that America, with her vast spaces, and the Soviet Union with its enormous expanse, might, perhaps, extract themselves from the ultimate disaster of atomic warfare. It may be that, in the great areas of those countries, some people might survive a war of that kind, but we know that, placed as we are between the hammer and the anvil, if there were to be an atomic war we should be the receiving base for the most intense form of attack. It is we who would suffer the worst disasters of such a war."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 5th November. 1953; Vol. 520, c. 408–10.]
I spoke in those terms and I called on the Government to try to see, if they could not carry out the original Baruch-Lilienthal proposals for the control of atomic bombs from which the Soviet Union had withdrawn after it had developed the atomic bomb, that there should be a summit meeting in which this terrible danger weighing over the heads of mankind might be considered and proposals made for its removal.
The hon. Member for Cheltenham (Mr. Dodds-Parker), with whom I hope shortly to go on a journey, followed me and said that he found the problems which I mentioned difficult to apprehend. I have some sympathy with him, because in 1953 these were important problems, difficult to apprehend, difficult to conceive of and to understand. If it was difficult for the hon. Gentleman, who is a highly intelligent and experienced Member of this House, it must have been an even greater problem for a layman elsewhere to understand. As knowledge of what the atomic bomb meant grew and spread men like Kingsley Martin, Ritchie Calder and J. B. Priestley, who did apprehend the problem, came together in order to try to instruct the public in the meaning of nuclear weapons, the atomic and hydrogen bombs.
I want to revert to a point which I made at the beginning of my speech, because the "Communists" smear has been repetitiously introduced into the debate and we can expect that it will be repeated very often before it ends. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament owed nothing in its origins to Communist inspiration. In the early stages, the Communists opposed the Campaign. In their contorted way, they argued—as the Conservatives seem to be arguing today—that British nuclear weapons made Britain less dependent on American nuclear policies and that, somehow or other, if Britain had nuclear weapons, it would automatically be divided from the United States because it could follow an independent line. That was the sophism used in those days and up to 1958 in order to oppose the aims of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, this radical movement.
It was only later on that the Communists, in the ways they have always used, the technique of "boring from within", tried to capture the Campaign, when they saw that it was a great political force which enlisted the energies, the enthusiasms and moral purposes of vast numbers of people, of a young generation which wanted to have hope and to look forward to life, which did not want to suffer from the fact that their elders had invented this evil thing. As one who, in 1958, marched to Aldermaston, I know that people were concerned.

The C.N.D. movement in which they were engaged was a heart cry and not a policy. It was for politicians to make policies. The marchers were, for the most part, very young people, among whom I was slightly embarrassed to find myself. They were protesting—perhaps unjustly—against the men of my generation who had left them the legacy of the nuclear problem. They did not know how it happened. All they knew was that it was there and hanging over them. They felt that a generation with a past had denied them a future.
As the hon. Member for Banbury was speaking, in my mind's eye I saw the great processions of people marching to Aldermaston. I thought that it was not an accident that there were so many thousands of young women carrying children. The infants in their turn were carrying strontium in their bones, strontium released by the atomic blasts which were part of the heritage which had been bequeathed to them by those people who had discovered the atomic bomb and who still regarded it as a potential weapon of war. They were a doomed generation crying out for mercy. That was the nature of the marchers in 1958.
I will not pretend that disreputable people did not attach themselves to the march. I think it is well-known that every movement of social protest attracts the worst as well as the best in a society. Nor is it surprising that these protests were often disfigured at the outset by people who were trying to serve other ends. When one considers how many tens of thousands of people squelched through the slush, trudged through the snow and the rain in order to demonstrate their beliefs, no one can then say that the Aldermaston marchers were the sinister rabble of the witch-hunter's imagination. They were ordinary, worth-while men and women, non-political for the most part, exercising the traditional right of procession in order to declare their views.
The hon. Member's Motion makes no mention of the Committee of 100. At one time regarded as a part of C.N.D., the Committee of 100, led by Lord Russell, was in constant conflict with the views of the Campaign. To my knowledge, no member of the Government who is indicted in the Motion had any connection with the Committee of 100.


I deplore the technique of the "sit-down" It was a technique which put gross strains and burdens on a police force which, by any standards, was patient, tolerant and understanding. Those people made a laughing stock of the serious purpose of protest. They gave undue opportunities to exhibitionists.
While I do not doubt the bona fides of many who take part in these unattractive demonstrations, I still believe that the activism of the Committee of 100, reaching out into other spheres of activity and policies with no relevance to those of the originators of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, did a disservice both to the cause of nuclear disarmament and Parliamentary democracy. I thought that the hon. Member went out of his way to try to identify the Aldermaston marchers and their supporters in the Government as members of a sinister conspiracy. I speak now of those members of the Government who have been pilloried on these lines.
As the hon. Gentleman read out the list in the attitude of a commissar or gauleiter, I thought that he was going to conclude by saying, "Off to the salt mines." This method of nomination for the pillory by list is something novel in British politics and something to be deplored. When it comes to drawing up lists, we are beginning to imitate the totalitarian techniques the hon. Gentleman so rightly deplores—

Mr. Marten: I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman was here at the beginning of my speech—

Mr. Edelman: Mr. Edelman indicated assent.

Mr. Marten: He was. He must have heard me say that I was not criticising the C.N.D. at all.

Mr. Edelman: I was here at the beginning of the hon. Gentleman's speech, and its opening had no relevance to its conclusion. I cannot help feeling that somewhere along the way he must have been incited by the applause and sniggers of those beside him.
Those of us on this side of the House who know the members of the Government who were members of the Campaign know their reality as distinct from the caricature which the hon. Gentleman presented.

At a time when it was very unpopular to support the cause even of banning nuclear testing, they were ready to stick their necks out. They put self-interest behind them. They were ready to advance a cause at first obscure and long unpopular which, in many areas, now has general acceptance, and I mean specifically in the ban on nuclear tests. They deserve the praise and not the deprecation of the House.
I began by giving my views and I hope that hon. Members will bear with me if I develop them a little further. None of us, unlike hon. Gentlemen opposite, is congealed in his views. Having said that, and speaking for myself alone, the Cuba confrontation was a watershed in my thinking. I cannot help feeling that when it happened a new era, perhaps a temporary one but certainly a new one, entered into the relationship between the great Powers. Khrushchev backed down to President Kennedy's determination because in that context of power Khrushchev decided that Cuba was not worth a nuclear war.
We must recognise, however, that power considerations tend to change. We are for the time being protected by a deterrent which must of its nature become more complex, more multifaceted and more final with each day's new scientific discoveries and developments and as minor Powers assemble nuclear armouries. This is not a time for petty recrimination and abuse. I therefore regret that the hon. Member for Banbury should have taken this vast subject which so deeply concerns every man, woman and child in this country down from the height where it should have been discussed and dragged it in the gutter.
We live in an anxious world which constantly sees monsters giving birth to monsters. We see fear of Russia being replaced by a super fear of China and bombs so big that they cannot be used except as nuclear boomerangs for suicide. The C.N.D. has had its day of protest. Perhaps it has other tasks, in which I will not take part. Those who took part in the Aldermaston march have no reason for regret or shame, but every reason for pride and honour for having helped to alert the world to the disasters confronting it.
If our generation can find a solution to the nuclear problem and if we can achieve multilateral nuclear disarmament, then I believe that among those who posterity will thank will be in the very first place my hon. and right hon. Friends who are so unfairly indicted today.

6.3 p.m.

Mr. Eldon Griffiths: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Coventry, North (Mr. Edelman), who put his views succinctly and with the agreement of many hon. Gentlemen opposite. I honour him for having done that.
I first saw the C.N.D. in its march to Aldermaston on American television. At that time I felt proud in a sense that the tradition of dissent in Britain was being pursued by those who went on that march. I say that with all sincerity. I felt it right to say to the many Americans with whom I discussed the C.N.D. that I was glad, as an Englishman living in their country, that we had dissent and protest. I also pointed out the great care with which the British police managed the whole business. In the United States in those days there was less dissent and protest.
Further to the remarks of the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Zilliacus), I hope that it will be recognised by hon. Gentlemen opposite in the same sincere fashion that not only the young men and women who marched to Aldermaston felt sincerely for peace. There were at the R.A.F. station in my constituency, to which protests were made, many men in uniform flying our nuclear bombers who held just as sincere views for peace and who were as concerned as certain hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite and members of the C.N.D. for the maintenance of peace in the world. Views differ and I hope that we will not challenge too much the motives which lead us to them.
My impressions of the C.N.D. in this country were formed very much as a result of a visit which I paid to Bertrand Russell on his high farm in North Wales. I spoke with him there for several hours about the C.N.D. because I was perplexed. I was not sure just where I stood in the matter. I have as a proud

possession a tape recording of the three-hour conversation we had.
I have, with some doubt, come to the feeling that I must support all the way the retention of the British deterrent. That is the view to which I have finally come, but I have reached it with some misgivings and in a difficult fashion because this is a problem on which no man can lightly make a decision. However, this is the decision I now hold and I hope that hon. Gentlemen opposite will recognise that if they are sincere in their campaign for nuclear disarmament, we on our side may be equally sincere and patriotic in our desire to maintain the nuclear deterrent. I am, therefore, glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Mr. Marten) has tabled the Motion because there is here a matter fundamental to the constitutional Government of this country.
This debate seeks to establish the influence of the C.N.D. on the conduct of the affairs of this country. As such, it is a perfectly proper debate for the House to be having. I take this question to be highly relevant because the British people as a whole have been led to believe that the present Administration have given up their connections with the C.N.D. This impression was given in the Labour Party's manifesto and in the statements of senior members of the Government.
In so far as the Government have severed their affiliations with the C.N.D., I am extremely glad that they have done so. [Interruption.] However, I am bound to confess to a great deal of puzzlement about this because while the Government say, and appear to mean, that they accept the Polaris bases in Scotland, the C.N.D. opposes those bases. Some members of the Government are members of the C.N.D. and I want to know whether or not they support the Polaris bases there. The country is entitled to an answer.
Equally, the Government are in favour of and, by their actions, support the rearmament of West Germany. The Prime Minister made it clear during his visit to West Germany where he stood. The C.N.D., on the other hand, opposes the rearmament of Germany. I want to know where members of the Government who are, or have been, members of the C.N.D. stand on this issue. The country


is entitled to an answer to that question, too.
The Government have made it clear that they are in favour of maintaining the British nuclear deterrent. There are now, as we sit here, British bombs in British aircraft east of Suez and, I hope, west of Suez, too. This is the Government's policy, but the C.N.D. is opposed to it. Are the members of the Government who are or were members of the C.N.D. in favour of it? This is another question to which the country should be given an answer.
The situation appears to be that on this whole range of nuclear and foreign policy questions some right hon. Gentlemen in the Cabinet support the Government's policy and—

Mr. Manuel: rose—

Mr. Griffiths: I will not give way just yet.

Hon. Members: Give way.

Mr. Manuel: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman recognises that in all Cabinets and in all Governments the Cabinet responsibility is the ultimate rule. In the former Administration there were divisions of opinion and disagreements. He is bound to recognise that in any Government such divisions of opinion are bound to arise. Would he not agree that it is the Cabinet responsibility which is all important? Would he not also agree—although I will not mention names—that during the Suez crisis, for example, my hon. Friends and I could have raised this sort of matter, although doing so would not and could not have taken us very far?

Mr. Griffiths: I accept the hon. Gentleman's point. There are, of course, divisions of opinion within all Cabinets and I agree that there is collective responsibility in the end. However, today's debate is trying to discover how far these differences of opinion in the present Cabinet are affecting the conduct of this country's policies. I maintain, I think with evidence, that they are very much affecting the conduct of British affairs.
I want to ask hon. Members opposite how those members of the C.N.D. who are now members of the Government have been able to square their consciences, as they have changed their opposition in

many important speeches. In opposition, Members on the Front Bench opposite opposed the bomb; in Government they are maintaining it. In Opposition they opposed the Royal Air Force playing its part in the Western deterrent; in Government they are supporting it. How have they been able to square their consciences in making this change of front?
When I consider the question of squaring one's conscience, there seem to me to be only three possible explanations; they were not very sincere in their original support of the C.N.D., or they were sincere in that support, but are even more sincere about wanting jobs in the Government, or they were not very serious about the C.N.D. in the first place and do not really much mind either way about the particular policies I have been discussing.
Let us look at the three possibilities, the first being that they were not very sincere in their attachment to the C.N.D. in the first place. They marched, but they are not prepared to vote against the Government. They were against the bomb in 1964, but they are not against it in 1965. Surely, these are men of little faith. They are political changelings. We all know that it happens, but I ask hon. Members opposite to explain how they have been able to square their consciences.
The second possibility is that they were very sincere when they marched with the C.N.D., and I accept that—sitting on a wet newspaper is no light matter for an elderly Labour politician—but if they were sincere it is quite evident by this change of front that they are more sincere in their desire to sit on the Treasury Bench. These are not the men of little faith but the men of great ambition. No one in this House will blame them for that, but let us be spared the humbug and the hypocrisy of saying that what they say today is the same as what they said a year ago. It is quite plain that it is not, and the Left wing of the Labour Party knows perfectly well that it is not but that they have changed their front. Let them not pretend that they are being consistent.
The last of the three possibilities is that these people were not very sincere but simply floated on what they thought was the trend or tide of political advantage. It may well be that they are in the majority, but, if they are, let us


not be told that we owe them the respect due to great seekers after peace. They are no more great seekers after peace than the rest of us. What I confess to finding personally objectionable is the seizing and monopolising of the issue of peace and wrapping it around as if it belonged to them, and to no one else. They have no right to seek that monopoly, and in their hearts they know it.

Mr. Emlyn Hooson: To relate what the hon. Gentleman has so far been saying on the Motion, which regrets the influence of the C.N.D. on the Government in relation to the bomb, what I understood the hon. Member to say was that the Government were against the bomb before they came to power and in favour of it since. Does not this show that the C.N.D. have had no influence on their policy but that the Tory Policy really led them to do something else?

Mr. Griffiths: The hon. and learned Gentleman's intervention is precisely the same as that which has been made from the other side of the Chamber. It is a good point. My answer is that I simply do not know whether they have changed their policy or not. The purpose of this debate is to find out.
I am reminded that I must continue to look at the relation of the C.N.D. to Government policies, and I will do so. I do not doubt that some 70 or 80 hon. Members opposite have been or are members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I do not blame them for that—in some respects I respect them for it—but let us face it as a fact. I will mention only one, and I have given him prior notice—the hon. Member for Salford, West (Mr. Orme). In 1958, the hon. Member wrote a pamphlet in which he said:
My hope is to convert Labour to C.N.D.—partly by the C.N.D. challenge to Westminster.
The hon. Member for Salford, West went on:
But you do not change the policy of the Labour Party overnight. I estimate it will take us about 18 months"—

Mr. Stanley Orme: I am very sorry, but I must point out that the hon. Member is referring to my hon. Friend the Member for Salford, East (Mr. Frank Allaun).

Mr. Griffiths: I beg the hon. Gentleman's pardon. I mean the hon. Member for Salford, East (Mr. Frank Allaun).
A few months later the hon. Member for Salford, East, was brought into the Government, and in the light of his earlier remarks it was perfectly plain that he would sincerely seek to change the Government to the C.N.D. Quite obviously, he failed. He resigned, and I honour him for that, but I did not—

Mr. Frank Allaun: The hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends are objecting to the influence of the C.N.D.-ers in the Labour ranks. Why did he and his hon. Friends not object to the far greater influence of the Institute of Directors and the financial interests in the Conservative Government?

Mr. Griffiths: I shall not attempt to go into that.
I want now to refer to the hon. Member for Leek (Mr. Harold Davies). I am sorry that I have not been able to give him prior notice, because communications with Hanoi are not satisfactory—

Mr. Manuel: Cheap.

Mr. Griffiths: The hon. Member for Leek is conducting a major—[Interruption.]

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Dr. Horace King): Order. Hon. Members must by now have learned to listen to hon. Members whose views they do not share.

Mr. Griffiths: The hon. Member for Leek is conducting, or attempting to conduct, an extremely diplomatic mission on behalf of the Prime Minister. He was, I understand, a member of the C.N.D.—it may be that he still is, but I understood an hon. Member opposite to say that he has now resigned. If so, I am very glad to hear it. Presumably, however, his attitude to foreign affairs has been influenced by the C.N.D., of which he was a very ardent and sincere member.
He made his attitude clear in a debate on the Polaris missile base on 16th December—and I hope hon. Members opposite will listen to this. The hon. Member made a ringing declaration—and hon. Members opposite will enjoy this:
… this party of ours is still the most powerful in the world"—


He was immediately interrupted by his hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, East (Mr. McLeavy) with a remark that hon. Members opposite may savour even more. He said:
It will not be if the hon. Gentleman has anything to do with it.
I may say that that is my view today.
The hon. Member for Leek then spoke of some items of British foreign policy. Let us bear in mind all the time that this is said by a Minister conducting the affairs of Britain in Hanoi. He said of America:
… the military élite are dominating the United States of America … they are trying to prevent any conclusions that would lead to disarmament successes.
That was the hon. Gentleman's view of America.

Mr. Mikardo: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Griffiths: I am sorry, no.
The hon. Member for Leek said of our German allies, whom the Prime Minister recently visited:
Once we agree to the rearmament of Germany and … to Polaris bases, we are doomed to be puppets, with Panzer divisions on our soil …"—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 16th December, 1960; Vol. 632, cc. 740–752.]
That is what the hon. Gentleman said about Germany—and he is now conducting British policy. He referred to S.E.A.T.O. and CENTO as "piddling pacts"—

Mr. Buchan: On a point of order, Mr Deputy-Speaker. Is it in order for an hon. Member to attack another hon. Member who, in the circumstances of the case, could not be given notice of the attack, as he is seeking to put forward the policy of the Government and the nation at the present time?

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: I am afraid that it is not a question of order. I cannot rule on courtesy.

Mr. Griffiths: May I make clear to you, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, that I do not attack the hon. Member for Leek? [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] I am stating what is on the record as his own words. I propose to continue to do so. He said of CENTO and S.E.A.T.O. that they were "piddling pacts". That was the statement

of a man who is now representing his country abroad. He said of N.A.T.O.:
We need to make it clear that N.A.T.O. is not to be a permanent feature of our foreign policy.
Now he is representing this country abroad. In his peroration he said:
I hope … that hon. Members on my side of the House will fight, fight, fight again …"—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 16th December, 1960; Vol. 632, c. 753–4.]
That was the statement of the hon. Member for Leek. At the end of that debate the House divided on the proposal that the Polaris base should be removed from this country. He was supported in the Division Lobby by a very large number of hon. Members who are now Her Majesty's Ministers. Among them, we find from HANSARD, was the Secretary of State for the Colonies. Does he support the statements of the hon. Member for Leek now? If so, will he say so?
There was the Minister for Overseas Development who supported the hon. Member on the question of pushing out the Polaris base. Does she support that proposal now? If so, will she say so? The Minister of Housing and Local Government also voted with the hon. Member for Leek. Does he support that policy and will he say so? The challenge is there. There was the Joint Under-Secretary to the Ministry of Education. Does she support the policy now? There was the Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport. Where does he stand now? They made it clear by going into the Lobby with the hon. Member for Leek where they stood then. I do not quarrel with their sincerity, but they have not made clear where they stand now and the country is entitled to know.

Mrs. Anne Kerr: Has it occurred to the hon. Member that they may well be using their influence within the Government—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."]—and representing a large body of opinion of the people of Britain?

Mr. Griffiths: The hon. Lady took the words out of my mouth for my next note says, "We can take it that their influence is still at work, supporting policies which out of one side of the mouth of the Government they agree with and out of the other side they disagree with." Quietly, secretly and furtively they are seeking to destroy the policies of those


Right Wing members of the Government with whom they profoundly disagree and are damaging the firm stand which the Foreign Secretary has taken on some issues.
This is the reason above all else why this debate is being held in the House today. Foreign nations accept that the policy of Her Majesty's Government is that stated by the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister, yet they know that in the Cabinet are men who disagree and who on their record are opposed to those very policies. Can it be wondered that foreign countries wonder out of which side of their mouths the present Government are speaking? There is here a lack of confidence. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is not influenced by C.N.D. I am glad to say, said:
For Britain to renounce nuclear weapons of her own would be as useless a gesture as spitting against the wind.
He said that in London on 23rd September, 1960, but what did the Secretary of State for the Colonies say at almost the same time? He said:
I believe it is morally wrong for us to have or to manufacture or to stockpile nuclear weapons.
Does he stand for that now while Her Majesty's Government are manufacturing and stockpiling nuclear weapons in this country? The Minister of Labour, a very firm stander for love of this country in public, said:
Unilateral disarmament of Britain would seriously upset the balance of power.
I believe that to be true, but what did the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland say? He said:
If giving up the bomb means getting out of N.A.T.O., then we have to get out of N.A.T.O.
The only one of the Ministers who managed to say two things at the same time was, of course, the right hon. Gentleman the First Secretary of State and Secretary of State for Economic Affairs. He managed to span the whole issue. He said:
Should we have an H-bomb? I answer that one by saying that we should retain it.
But not long afterwards he wrote in Tribune:
We should long have ceased to argue let alone to maintain, an independent nuclear deterrent.

Other Ministers contradict one another, but he contradicted himself.
This situation is not good enough. The people of this country have been led to believe that the Government have put aside C.N.D. policies. Have they or have they not? We cannot be sure and I hope that when the Minister replies to the debate he will give precise answers to three questions. Will he on behalf of the Government reject the policies of the C.N.D. and, as the Foreign Secretary has already done, say straight out that they are not in favour of unilateral British disarmament? Will he say that on behalf of the British Government? Will he say on the subject of Vietnam that he is not in favour of policies as advocated by the C.N.D. which would lead to the United States being pushed out and a Communist Vietnam established to quieten those who oppose it?
Will he convey to the Prime Minister this question? Will the Prime Minister cause his Cabinet Ministers to say clearly and out loud that they support the Foreign Secretary's position on Vietnam, that they support the policy of the Minister of Defence on Polaris and the Minister for the R.A.F. in their policy east of Suez? Will he say that these are the views of the Government and that he has no time for the views of the C.N.D. and its 80 supporters in this House? If he says that, he will go a long way to reestablish the confidence which his Government need but which I am afraid they have not got.

6.26 p.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Army (Mr. G. W. Reynolds): The hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Eldon Griffiths) started his speech in a very reasonable manner. Unfortunately, as he went along he descended to a lower and lower level of sneer and abuse against my hon. and right hon. Friends inside the Government and on the back benches of this side of the House. In the way in which he put his final questions I shall treat them, I will ignore them for the rest of this speech. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."]
I shall ignore them because Ministers speaking from this Bench, the Foreign Secretary, the Prime Minister and other right hon. Friends, have made perfectly clear the Government's policy ever since


October last year on the various points made by the hon. Member. If he wishes to find what the Government's policy is, it is in the pages of HANSARD for him to read. When the mover of a Motion of this nature takes 55 minutes it does not give me the time to go into all the factors I should like to discuss on this occasion.
When the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was formed in 1958, it had many aims and fears which most hon. Members would accept justified setting up the organisation to foster comment on this subject. Whether one agreed with it or not is another matter, but particularly in the period 1960 to 1963 there was a mass of discussion and argument of the problems which were being put before the country by members of the Campaign, culminating in a meeting of 50,000 people in Trafalgar Square in 1960, 1961, 1962 and 1963.
During that whole period, I do not remember the then Prime Minister or Foreign Secretary or Secretary of State for Defence or hardly any hon. Member opposite taking any part in that debate. They sat still and said nothing hoping that because some of us in the Labour Party were participating in the debate on both sides the Labour Party would tear itself to pieces. They sat back and said not a word on that important subject during that period. Fortunately they were not correct in their assumption for the Labour Party did not tear itself to pieces. The hon. Member for Banbury (Mr Marten) asked Questions on 29th March, the 17th May and 6th June, 1962, about the expense involved in policing those meetings. That was the extent of his interest in the problem at that time.
Her Majesty's Government share the desire of supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that ways must be found of saving mankind from the horrors of nuclear war. We differ from them on the methods, but these are differences of view which can be genuinely held by individuals themselves. Her Majesty's Government are working at the moment for an agreement to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons; for an extension to the nuclear test ban treaty to cover underground tests; for a freeze in the numbers and characteristics of delivery vehicles; and for the first time there is in Her Majesty's Government at the moment a Minister working full-time

on this particular problem of trying to get agreement in the international field. We believe that it is possible to diminish the prospects of nuclear war and at the same time properly discharge the responsibilities of the Government for the security of the nation.
I am sure that many of the things that the Government are now trying to do in the international field will be supported individually by supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I am equally certain that they are also the views of the United States Government; but presumably, In the eyes of some hon. Members opposite, if some things which the United States Government are trying to do happen to agree with the views of C.N.D., that shows that the C.N.D. is influencing the United States Government as well. These are the lengths to which hon. Members opposite have tried to push some of their arguments this afternoon. Nevertheless, the Government are trying to do these things.
In the Motion and in the speeches to which we have listened there is an implication that this country's defences and the lives of British soldiers are being put at risk because of the pressure by the C.N.D. on Her Majesty's Government at present. This is the implication in the Motion. I maintain that since October of last year the defences of this country, the defensive position of this country, and the action of this country in the world to try to secure a lasting peace are considerably better and brighter than they were in October, 1964.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, so we are told by the hon. Member for Banbury, wants to see Britain disarmed. The hon. Gentleman was in part responsible for some of the things which we found when we entered office at the Ministry of Defence in 1964. I cannot help feeling that some members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament must have felt that they had some supporters in the last Government, in view of some of the mess-ups we found on taking office. We found infantry battalions 6 per cent. under-manned; that is an average of 60 men short in each battalion. This was after 13½ years of Tory Government. We found that treaties we had with European countries to have a certain number of troops in


Germany had been completely ignored and we were some 3,000 to 4,000 men short in B.A.O.R.
We found that, after spending £20,000 million, hon. Members opposite had provided us with helicopters which were being used in the Middle East and the Far East whose engines were not reliable and which were causing operational difficulties to our troops out there. We found that our troops in Aden had 81 millimetre mortars and, at that time, no 81 millimetre bombs. So our troops had to use 3-in. bombs. They were out-ranged by the forces deployed against them. We have managed to put that right since 15th October last. In the Far East the Navy was being forced to use 12 knot Second World War Minesweepers to try to catch Indonesian 20 knot and faster boats. This was the situation in which these men were left by hon. Members opposite.
We found the aircraft programme so far behind in development that planes which were at that time still under development would not be ready to replace the Canberras and other planes, which were supposed to be due for replacement, for years and years and the Air Force and the Navy would have been left without air cover. We were forced to buy American aircraft.

Mr. Marten: rose—

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: The hon. Member for Banbury (Mr. Marten) knows that if the Minister does not give way he must resume his seat.

Mr. Reynolds: The hon. Member for Banbury would not give way to me. We found a situation where there was a shortage of tyres—the rubber things which go on the wheels of vehicles—which at one stage meant that we were dangerously near to having to restrict the operational use of vehicles in theatres where they were in operation. We found that at one stage it might have been necessary even to call off some territorial army training this year because of a shortage of tyres. This is the situation we found after 13½ years. That, I may say, has now been put right due to a lot of hard work by a number of people.
We found a situation in confrontation in Malaysia where Indonesian troops coming across the border were armed

with better jungle rifles than our own troops had. There again, we had to buy American, and that problem has been solved. This was after the Tories had spent £20,000 million on defence in a matter of 13 years. Now they have the audacity to table Motions such as this one which seem to indicate that the present Government are not capable of dealing with defence problems but that they were so efficient at it. I have mentioned only a few of the things. I have mentioned only the things we have dealt with. There are many others which we will mention in due course when we have solved the problem left us on 15th October of last year.

Mr. Hooson: rose—

Mr. Reynolds: I will not give way at all—I am sorry. I thought that the hon. Member for Banbury, in moving the Motion, would give us some examples of C.N.D. influence on the Government's policy. I submit that he did not give any example at all in moving the Motion, nor has any other hon. Member opposite, where C.N.D. has in fact influenced the Government since 15th October of last year. The hon. Member quoted from Sanity—this was the only quote he gave—to the effect that the Prime Minister had, according to the quote, given the brush-off to a C.N.D. demonstration. I did not find that very convincing evidence of C.N.D. pressure and influence on the Government at that time. The hon. Gentleman said that he himself had asked the Prime Minister a Question dealing with defence policy, suggesting that it was leaning on or going over to the views of C.N.D., but the Prime Minister had not changed the policy at all.
The hon. Gentleman then stated the C.N.D. policy with regard to Vietnam and congratulated my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary for the stand he had been taking on this problem. The hon. Gentleman criticised, or tried to criticise, the Prime Minister and said that he was being influenced by C.N.D. in connection with our policy in Vietnam However, if I remember rightly, the Leader of the Opposition has supported my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister on all the main aspects of the Government's attitude and policy on Vietnam. Does this mean that the Leader of the


Opposition is also influenced by C.N.D., or does it mean that there is no real proof in this matter at all?
The hon. Gentleman criticised—I do not quite see where the influence of C.N.D. came in on this—the setting up of the Commonwealth Mission and the sending of my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance to Vietnam, not in themselves, but just on timing. So the hon. Gentleman's criticism of this Mission is not the decision itself. He is merely criticising the timing, which apparently C.N.D. has had an influence over in some way which I have not yet been able to—[Interruption.]

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Order. The hon. Member for Banbury, who addressed the House at length, must contain himself while the Minister is speaking.

Mr. Reynolds: The hon. Gentleman went on to say that C.N.D. wants the Polaris bases closed. He continued by saying that the Prime Minister has told him that he does not intend to do this. How does this show that C.N.D. is influencing what the Prime Minister and the Government are doing? The hon. Gentleman did not bring forward one single matter which could be taken as convincing proof that the terms of his Motion are correct and should be supported by the House.
The hon. Gentleman had a bit of fun over my right hon. Friend the Minister of Technology. The hon. Gentleman seemed to be criticising something that my right hon. Friend said at the conference of the Transport and General Workers' Union at the Guildhall, Portsmouth, Hampshire, on Friday, 9th July, 1965. I, too, am a member of the Transport and General Workers' Union. I completely agree with the statement that my right hon. Friend the Minister of Technology made and which was criticised by the hon. Gentleman when my right hon. Friend said:
I was delighted that you have this week registered your firm views about some matters of real concern.
That is what my right hon. Friend said to the conference. I completely agree with that statement. I would be horrified to think that an organisation like the Transport and General Workers' Union did not meet in annual conference

and give consideration to problems of international and national affairs which are of real concern to the people of this country and to its own members. I completely agree with my right hon. Friend on that point.
We must now look at the record of the hon. Member for Banbury. He said that C.N.D. policy was to get out of some of our overseas bases. I do not believe I am wrong in saying that he said that this was C.N.D. policy. Perhaps he would care to have a look after this debate is over at a speech he made in the House on 5th March, 1962, c. 138. Referring to the balance of payment difficulties, he suggested that we withdraw some of our troops from Germany. That is C.N.D. policy, I understand.
The hon. Gentleman went on a little later in his speech today to say that it was C.N.D. policy to get out of Aden and Singapore. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would care to look at c. 137 of 5th March, 1962, when, speaking of Aden and Singapore, he said:
If we were to withdraw on our own initiative without being forced out, I believe that we should maintain the good will of the countries concerned.
He also described C.N.D. policy as wanting to get rid of our nuclear deterrent. May I suggest that he looks at that speech of his in column 142 where, talking about the possibility of handing over control of United Kingdom nuclear weapons to N.A.T.O., he said:
I know that defence changes from year to year, and it may be inevitable that some such arrangement will have to be made ultimately …".—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 5th March, 1962; Vol. 655, cc. 137 and 142.]
That is what Her Majesty's Government are trying to do. He said that in 1962. His actual words were:
… defence changes from year to year …
That is what the hon. Gentleman said six months before he was invited to become Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Aviation. As these things were then not the policy of the Government, did he completely change his views and disavow the views that he put forward, that we should get out of Aden and Singapore, that we should bring home British troops from Germany and some time in the future hand over control of our weapons to N.A.T.O.? That is what


he said a few months before he entered the Government. Did he change his views?

Mr. Marten: The hon. Gentleman must recognise that if these speeches are read—I do not know whether he has read them, or whether extracts have been given to him by his staff—[HON. MEMBERS: "Answer."] I am answering. The hon. Gentleman must recognise that in debates one thinks aloud—[Laughter.]

Mr. Mikardo: Sit down.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: The hon. Member must be allowed to intervene.

Mr. Marten: Surely the essence of debate is that we are thinking aloud. [Laughter.] What is so funny about that? If the hon. Member reads that speech he will find that that quotation, which presumably he has been given and was taken out of context, was not at variance with the Government's views.

Mr. Reynolds: The hon. Member should know that I was not given that quotation. He spoke to me in the Library yesterday when I was reading his speech. What the hon. Gentleman is saying is that he was thinking aloud at the time. Is he saying that it is all right for a Tory Member of this House to put forward policies before he is in Government and then to enter a Government which does not accept those policies, but that it is not right for my hon. Friends to advocate policies some of which may not be advocated by the present Government? What is good for one side of the House is good for the other.
The Motion also hints at the existence of pressure groups. We all know that pressure groups exist. We all accept that they are perfectly legitimate in any field that one likes to think of. The main thing that we have to be concerned with is what real effect those pressure groups have, and no instance has been given this afternoon of any effect that C.N.D. has had on Her Majesty's Government since 15th October last year—so much so that some of my hon. Friends must have been disappointed at some of the stuff that has come out in the debate this afternoon.
It was the brewers' lobby which had such a terrific effect on hon. Members

opposite that the first piece of legislation they introduced in 1951–52 was the freeing of public houses in new towns. It was the road haulage and steel lobbies which influenced them to denationalise road haulage and steel. It was the so-called Cliveden set before the war who tried to influence the Conservatives' defence policy in the years before 1939. It was the commercial television lobby which forced hon. Members opposite, when they were in government, to set up the Independent Television Authority, and that lobby has been very well documented. One can read everything about it. It was the property company lobby which led to the Rent Act. 1957. We have had government by pressure group during the last 13 years and the time has now come to bring it to an end.
But there is a pressure group still remaining on the other side of the House. It has been working hard under the hon. Member for Banbury, directed against his hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr. John Hall). We could have spent three hours this afternoon having a useful discussion on the future of Europe and the position of this country related to Europe. Instead, we have wasted three hours of the time of this House.

6.45 p.m.

Captain Walter Elliot: I have listened to the Minister with considerable interest. He attacked my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Mr. Marten), and I am sure my hon. Friend is well able to look after himself. We have spent a lot of time listening to the deficiencies which the hon. Gentleman alleges his Government inherited from the previous Government. I suppose that attack is the best form of defence, and I can only attribute the nature of his speech to the fact that he was working on that theory. I do not propose to waste any time on that matter.
I want to take up straight away a point which the hon. Member for Coventry, North (Mr. Edelman) mentioned, because it is important. He cast doubts—other hon. Members have done so, too—on the motives for initiating this debate. I think the hon. Member for Coventry, North suggested that by discussing the purposes of C.N.D. there was some object of smearing hon. Members who are connected with it, or members


of the movement itself, as being Communists. He went on to say that various persons and bodies—disreputable cranks and others—had attached themselves to it. Of course, I go along with him on that point. But I do not think my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury, in moving the Motion, had any intention of smearing either hon. Members or the movement with Communism in the sense of McCarthyism.
What my hon. Friend did, as I remember, was to give the objects for which C.N.D. stands, and which have been published. I want to repeat those because this is an important point. He said, first, that members of C.N.D. want to abandon our rôle east of Suez. If any hon. Members wish to contradict me I will give way. Secondly, he said they want to abandon our nuclear policy. They want to withdraw from N.A.T.O., S.E.A.T.O. and CENTO. They want to break up the Anglo-American alliance and to end British involvement in Malaysia and Indonesia. They want to get rid of TSR2, and the American Polaris base. They want the British to withdraw from overseas bases and they want to get rid of nuclear weapons. I believe that is what he said, and I agree that that would assist the Communists.

Mrs. Anne Kerr: One of the points in the creed of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is that the United Nations should become the cornerstone of our foreign policy. This policy happens to be part of the Labour Party's foreign policy.

Captain Elliot: I accept that from the hon. Lady. I mentioned the eight points which my hon. Friend put forward—and I agree with him—that it would assist the Communists if those policies were carried out. I believe my hon. Friend has done a great service in raising this matter, and giving us the opportunity to discuss the objects and the motives of C.N.D.
I am very sorry in some ways that the debate has developed as it has. Surely this was the very opportunity for hon. Members opposite to put before us the objects and motives of the C.N.D. I did not hear all the speeches, because unfortunately I had to go out to an engagement which I could not miss, but I should have thought that this was an excellent opportunity to put forward these objectives

in a calm and factual manner. I am sorry that the debate raised a good deal of heat and attacks from hon. Members opposite.

Mr. Mikardo: rose—

Captain Elliot: I cannot give way. I have only a short time to speak and think that the hon. Member has already spoken.

Mr. Mikardo: No.

Captain Elliot: In that event I will give way.

Mr. Mikardo: I merely wanted to say that it is a pity that the hon. and gallant Member missed the speeches of my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Zilliacus) and my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, North (Mr. Edelman), the only two back-bencher speeches made on this side of the House. Both were serious political analyses of the policies of this country, in contrast with three speeches from hon. Members opposite which were full of attacks on named individuals.

Captain Elliot: I heard the speech of the hon. Member for Coventry, North.
I repeat that I am sorry that the debate has developed in this way. I should like in the few remaining minutes to delve a little more deeply into one or two points and the effects of some aspects of C.N.D. policy on the defence of this country. I should have thought that, apart from a few hon. Members opposite and possibly one or two on this side of the House, most of us accept the need for a Western nuclear deterrent. Does the C.N.D. advocate Western unilateral disarmament? I am not sure whether or not that is what it advocates.

Mr. Mikardo: No.

Captain Elliot: The hon. Member says "No", but I am not at all certain. If supporters of C.N.D. do advocate that, it raises some important questions.

Mr. Mikardo: It would if they did, but they do not.

Captain Elliot: I do not want to go through again the eight objectives of the C.N.D., but it is pretty well-known that the C.N.D. wishes us to get rid of our


nuclear weapons. If members of the C.N.D. want Western unilateral disarmament that raises some important questions. Is it conceivable that a world composed only of Communist Powers on the one hand, armed with nuclear weapons, and a group of uncommitted, unarmed neutrals on the other would long remain in equilibrium? I do not believe that it would. The influence which the neutrals possess today is a by-product of the Western Alliance. I believe that the neutrals survive only in that part of the world left free by the existence of the strength of the West. There are no Switzerlands in the Communist orbit.
Does C.N.D. want the abandonment of the deterrent policy? This raises other questions. In the first place, it takes only about twelve months from scratch to make a bomb, and whether or not there are bombs already in existence at a particular moment of time is not very important. The menace is always there. If our nuclear armaments were scrapped, would hon. Members opposite who support the C.N.D. say that our civil defence organisation should not continue to train in case of a nuclear attack? At present if the West were to abandon its deterrent policy we should be left with the worst of both worlds. It would mean an enormous increase in our conventional weapons at great additional cost. The idea would grow that differences could be settled by conventional war and I believe that if we abandoned the deterrent policy we would substitute conventional war, for the virtual certainty of eventual nuclear war. I believe that this is one of the things to which C.N.D. policy might lead us. If the supporters of C.N.D. advocate the abandonment of nuclear weapons by this country—

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: I am sorry to interrupt the hon. and gallant Gentleman, but he must link his remarks to the Motion.

Captain Elliot: I am endeavouring to call attention to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the sort of objects at which it is aiming and I intend to lead on to the question of the effects which the campaign, if successful, will have on Government policy.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Order. I am sorry to interrupt again but I am asking

the hon. and gallant Member to lead on to the Motion now.

Captain Elliot: In any case I am bringing my remarks to a close. If the C.N.D. objectives are the eight which I have described and if supporters of C.N.D. exert the influence on the Government which we assert is likely, I believe that the effects which I have described are likely and that Members of the Government who support C.N.D. should declare unequivocally that they support the Government policy described by the Foreign Secretary or else resign from the Government.

6.58 p.m.

Mr. Stanley Orme: The debate initiated by the hon. Member for Banbury (Mr. Marten) three or four hours ago has blown up in the hon. Member's face and in the faces of his hon. Friends. The party opposite sought on this Motion to denigrate individuals who cannot answer back for themselves. They did not seek to deal with the basic issues involved. They treated the debate purely as a means of smearing individuals and that is something which is detestable in this House.

Mr. John Biggs-Davison: rose—

Hon. Members: Sit down.

Mr. Orme: I only hope that the people of this country, and the young people in particular, who read this debate and observe the contemptuous manner in which it has been dealt with by the party opposite will realise which is the party that is concerned about saving the world from annihilation and the party which discusses this matter and will continue to discuss it as it has in recent years.

Mr. Biggs-Davison: rose—

Hon. Members: Sit down.

Mr. Orme: The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is an honourable organisation which is supported by a vast cross-section of the people of this country. The only section of the country which does not support it is the Tories. It is significant that no debate has taken place inside the Tory Party when the rest of the nation and the world have been discussing nuclear policy over the past six or seven years.
When the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament began in 1958, during the sterile years of Tory leadership in this country, and when people started to discuss these basic issues—

It being Seven o'clock, the proceedings on the Motion lapsed, pursuant to Standing Order No. 5 (Precedence of Government Business).

Orders of the Day — MURDER (ABOLITION OF DEATH PENALTY) BILL

Order read for resuming adjourned debate on Amendment proposed [25th June] on consideration of the Bill, as amended.

Clause 1.—(ABOLITION OF DEATH PENALTY FOR MURDER.)

Which Amendment was: In page 1, line 7, to leave out "sentenced to imprisonment for" and insert:
liable at the discretion of the Court to imprisonment for life".
instead thereof.

Question again proposed, That "sentenced to imprisonment for" stand part of the Bill.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Dr. Horace King): I remind the House that with this Amendment we are taking Amendment No. 7, Clause 1, in page 1, line 7, at the end to insert:
such term as a full Court of Criminal Appeal (including the judge who tried the case) shall in its discretion determine".

7.1 p.m.

Mr. W. R. Rees-Davies: We move now from a consideration of nuclear deterrence and the peace of the world to another matter which involves the conscience of most hon. and right hon. Members. The difference between the debate which we have just concluded and this one is that the previous Motion was tabled by one of my hon. Friends and was taken in Private Members' time. The Bill now before the House is here by virtue of time provided by the Government, and it is all too clear that what began as a Private Member's Bill is now entirely a Government Bill.
This point is of importance in relation to the Amendment. It is crucial to make clear that, having been before a Standing Committee during the months of February and March and having been before a Committee of the whole House on many Wednesday mornings in time specially provided by the Government so that the House could meet for that purpose, the Bill is now given further time this evening, when time is precious for the Government in order to get their regular business through.
It may well be that the Government wish to secure the abolition of the death penalty, as does the promoter of the Bill, the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman), but what is perfectly plain is that they have no mandate whatever to abolish at the same time the power of Her Majesty's judges to determine what sentence shall be imposed. Throughout all the years during which lawyers have worked in this country, since time immemorial, it has been part of the power of Her Majesty's judges to determine the punishment, to determine the sentence to be imposed for serious crime. I emphasise at the outset that the House can give a mandate for the abolition of the death penalty, but it is quite wrong for the Government, by a back door in this way, to invite the House on this Bill to pass something which many people do not fully appreciate, that is, to abolish the judicial power to give a determinate sentence.
There has been only one sentence for a person convicted of murder, that is, to hang until he died. What was the purpose of this Bill other than to abolish hanging? It is purely by a back door that it is now suggested that another sentence should be substituted, the so-called life sentence, which in itself is an anomaly and entirely meaningless. In an earlier debate, I showed that those who had been convicted of murder and who had had their sentence commuted to one of life imprisonment had been released in one case after a year, in other cases after two or three years, and on average after about nine years.
Whether one is an abolitionist or a retentionist, there is no mandate whatever to deprive the public of the protection which they enjoy today, the protection of a deterrent sentence passed by one of Her Majesty's judges. It is the task of the judges to punish either by a severe punishment or, if they think right and having considered all the circumstances, by a compassionate sentence. I am not prepared to take the view that one should remove from Her Majesty's judges the right to determine what the sentence shall be. This Bill, ill-considered and ill-conceived as it is, gives no evidence of proper thought having been given to the appropriate alternative sentence or of anyone having applied his mind to the

need for a sentence which gives adequate and proper protection to society.
There can be no argument but that, at the time the sentence is given, the circumstances of different classes of murder are carefully considered. Of course, the circumstances vary enormously in almost every class of crime, but in the case of murder, because of the circumstance of provocation, because of the circumstance of responsibility, diminished or otherwise, there is an infinite variety, with psychiatric reasons on one side, evidence of violence on the other, and so on. Therefore, the public in this country, whether they wish to see the end of the death penalty or wish to see it preserved, want to be sure that a proper sentence is passed by a judge at the time determining the punishment upon the accused and having in mind all the circumstances, properly considering whether it should be a strong and deterrent sentence involving a heavy punitive element or whether, on the other hand, it should be a sentence of compassion.
There is no mandate to deprive an accused person and his family of the right to know how long his sentence will be. I can imagine nothing worse than to receive a sentence under which one will not have the faintest idea how long one will be required to serve. I ask the House to imagine the case of an individual who knows that the circumstances show a large element of mitigation but a case in which, nevertheless, the judge must go through the farce of imposing a sentence of life imprisonment although everyone knows that the man will not have to serve it. Imagine the position of his wife and family in such circumstances. Although he is given a life sentence, it is generally supposed that he will not, in all probability, have to serve more than two or three years, or perhaps even less.
Is it right that a person should receive a sentence about which he can have no real knowledge at all? Is it right to incarcerate a man in the same way as was done during the war under the 18B detention rule, a sentence just putting a person away without his knowing what the circumstances would really be? Can that be a right sentence? It is degrading to the public who do not know, and will be unable to know, the circumstances


and considerations to be applied thereafter, entirely on secret criteria, by the Home Secretary. The Home Secretary may be admirable. He may have admirable advisers. But the public are quite unable to know whether the advice tendered subsequently is the right and proper advice, and there is no public means by which they can secure that knowledge. So neither the man who is accused nor his family, nor his lawyer, nor his doctor, nor anyone on his behalf is able to know what the position will be. Representations may be made to the Home Office, but no answer will be received about the considerations to which the Minister and his advisers apply their minds in considering these factors.
Therefore, I would say that all those, whether or not they view abolition favourably, should join together and persuade the Government that now they are in full charge of the Bill in Government time, in the middle of the week in the evening, even at this late stage they should come forward and tell us what it is they propose to do.
At the moment, apparently, the House has already got the position of a hiatus. We have the position before the House in which no sentence of any kind now exists. We have to determine what shall be put there. So far, all we have been told by the hon. Gentleman who promotes the Bill is that he wishes to put back, in due course, life imprisonment. We have already sought to point out that life imprisonment is meaningless. We have spent all February, March, April and May, and we are now in the month of July. During this period, no doubt discussion has been going on in the Home Office as to what the sentencing policy shall be in the future, what rôle the judges shall play in sentencing, and what rôle the Executive shall play in sentencing. Have there been no thouhgts at all by the Home Secretary on this matter in the past six months, when it has been the subject of consistent and weekly debate? Has he not arrived at any conclusion as to whether it would not be practical to allow Her Majesty's judges to continue to determine the sentence at the time the man is convicted?

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Sir Frank Soskice): So far as

I am concerned, I am simply exercising the powers given to me under Section 27 of the Prison Act, 1952, passed during the Administration of a Conservative Government. I think the hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies) became a Member of the House in 1953. From 1953 onwards, has he ever questioned that Section or made the least endeavour to change it or annul it?

Mr. Rees-Davies: The 1952 Act was a mere repetition of the Act of 1893. The whole question of the consideration of sentence did not arise at all as long as one retained the death penalty. The position there was that, with an existing death penalty, it did not become necessary to consider the matter until after a prisoner had been granted the Prerogative of Mercy by the Home Secretary.

Sir F. Soskice: With great respect, there are many offences for which the penalty is life imprisonment. If this has been part of our legislation for years past, earlier than 1952, it is all the more remarkable that we have had to wait until 1965 for the hon. Gentleman to become so heated about it.

Mr. Rees-Davies: No, not a bit. Not only was that the position but the whole trend has been moving away from the passing of a life sentence. As the right hon. and learned Gentleman knows, in recent years the judges have been passing long and definitive sentences of periods of years. The most startling is the obvious recent example where sentences of 30 years were passed on the mail train robbers. In many other cases such sentences have been passed, but the number of life sentences in recent years, broadly speaking, having regard to the overall amount of serious crime, has been negligible.
The point I was making was this. At the moment the Bill came up for consideration, as it was quite clear it was going to last November, and since then, it became imperative to give consideration to what should be the sentencing policy. That is why I have been urging this point upon the right hon. Gentleman and upon those of his colleagues who for some time now have been considering what ought to be done.
There is a considerable body of support for a proper alternative among the hon. Gentlemen behind him, particularly those members of the trade union movement, who feel quite strongly that there ought to be a genuine sentence given by the judges, which could be a determinate if required, to meet the point. After all, it is widely believed in the country that at the present time a man will get a very much heavier sentence if he is a bank robber and uses no violence, being sentenced to 20 or 25 years, than he will if he commits a murder and is sentenced to life imprisonment.
7.15 p.m.
No mandate has been given at all to alter the whole of the method of judicial sentencing or to remove the protection inherent, in the public belief, in a long sentence by the judge from which a prisoner cannot be released. Let us remember this. The power of release is only given to the Home Secretary where there is a life sentence. It may well be that one will require to amend the law. One will. But this will give an opportunity, on such a Measure, to secure that there is a setting up of a proper review body. Meanwhile, let those who are sentenced now receive whatever sentences the judges think fit. They will then remain safely in custody, and the House can pass the requisite law to set up a proper type of review body in due course.
My right hon. Friend in an earlier Amendment, which I would be out of order in referring back to, dealt with one aspect—a panel of judges. It may well be that a review body which comprised partly judges, partly doctors and partly one or two outside men of eminent position might provide the type of review body which would assist the Home Secretary. But I cannot think that in this modern age it is right that there should not be some advisory committee to the Home Secretary to consider long sentences, including those of people convicted of murder, if, that is, the death penalty is to be abolished.
I know this is only the beginning of the debates on sentencing, and possibly we shall see a difference of view across the House between those who believe that

judges ought to give a determinate sentence and those who may take the view that judges should have the power to give an indeterminate sentence. I take the former view. But, whichever view one takes, I have the feeling that in due course the House will express a strong view that there ought to be some body to assist the Home Secretary to review long sentences.
That being so, I only want to speak briefly on one or two other points. If we are to remove this power from the judges, I believe that society will warn us that we are not adequately protected. If the Home Secretary is to keep unto himself entirely the powers of review, I think the public will be very frightened at the thought that they are dependent solely on his advice about whether it is safe to release a prisoner who has been convicted of murder. Personally, if I were Home Secretary, I would certainly wish to pass on, as far as I could, a measure of that responsibility to the shoulders of a panel of men and women able to assist and make recommendations in that regard. However able he may be at any given time, the Permanent Secretary to the Home Office is not a suitable single adviser to the Home Secretary in that regard. Nor do I think he would want it to be felt that he is responsible for the tendering of that advice, to which obviously the Home Secretary will pay very considerable regard.
However, there is another aspect. It has to be borne in mind that life sentences today—

Sir F. Soskice: I know the hon. Gentleman will want to get his facts right, because he is on a point which is important. I think he said that between 1914 and 1953 there were not 10 life sentences for offences other than murder.

Mr. Rees-Davies: I said there were very few.

Sir F. Soskice: The advice I have is that from 1954 to 1963—after the passing of the Prison Act, 1952—there were 24 such life sentences and, in addition, there were 68 life sentences for diminished responsibility for manslaughter. It seems extraordinary that if there were all those life sentences and the hon. Gentleman felt keenly about these processes which he has so unkindly described, he should


not have raised the matter earlier, but should have waited until 1965, during the discussion of this Bill, to raise it for the very first time.

Mr. Rees-Davies: I am afraid that it is the right hon. and learned Gentleman who should get his facts right. If he checks back he will find that, first of all, the larger proportion are those who were suffering from a sense of diminished responsibility, and those were discretionary sentences in such a term. He will also find that the others were a number of sentences where a life imprisonment sentence followed a conviction for murder. The point that I was making was that the number of life sentences given for other crimes than murder is virtually negligible. A number that were given for murder would not exist if the death penalty applied. Therefore, it is only since the change made in the Homicide Act, 1957, that we find that there is any substantial number at all, and these are really not very many.
It does not in the slightest degree alter the strength and direction of the argument that this Bill removes the normal traditional power of the judge to give a determinate sentence in almost every case.

Sir F. Soskice: Sir F. Soskice indicated dissent.

Mr. Rees-Davies: It is no good the right hon. and learned Gentleman shaking his head like that, because that really has fallen into desuetude. Nowadays there is a determinate sentence given in well over 99 per cent. of all the cases of serious murder. By retaining the word "life" here, one is removing from the judges the right to give a sentence for what has been regarded as the most unique form of serious crime. How can it he contended that if in the case of manslaughter they can give a determinate sentence of a period of years and if they are to do so in the case of robbery and violence, they are not to be trusted so to do in the case of murder? I find this argument hard to sustain.
Therefore, I turn straight away to bowl a fast one at the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne. He said last time in c. 2192 on 25th June that as the House had decisively rejected any judicial review, the right way to deal with the matter is to continue with the Bill providing life imprisonment.

I say to that "certainly not". If the hon. Gentleman provides for no review, the only review being the capacity of the Home Secretary to review a case when he sees fit, one comes back to the absence of four particular factors. One comes back, first, to the factor that one has not got any dual control. One has no control of the judiciary on the one hand, with a further separate consideration by the Home Secretary on the other. One has—this is repetition, it is true—no fair and determinate sentence passed upon the accused so that he knows what his position is. One has no means whereby the public can know the facts or see or hear what is going to be done. Lastly, one has no deterrent factor at all, and this is the fact which worries the public so much, because if one gives a life sentence, so to speak, higgledy-piggledy one not only degrades it but makes it meaningless in that those who are considered for early release will be all mixed up with those who are to serve for a long period.
Therefore, I conclude by saying that of all the real Amendments which have been tabled, the one tabled in this case by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Epsom (Sir P. Rawlinson) ought to be supported not only by those who favour the retention of the death penalty, but by all those in the House who really believe that we should have some proper alternative; and the best alternative that we can get is to allow Her Majesty's judges to give sentence and give an opportunity to the Home Secretary to consider the future position of sentencing as a whole and then come back with some proper system in the autumn whereby we shall have a review body which will be able to review long sentences not only in relation to those convicted of murder but those who receive long sentences for serious crimes such as robbery with violence. In that way we can get a fair and proper consideration of sentencing policy which is much overdue. I greatly hope that all my hon. Friends and hon. Members opposite will support my right hon. and learned Friend in pressing this Amendment in due course.

Mr. Michael English: I support what the hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies) has said in support of the Amendment. I have consistently supported my hon.


Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) because of the argument which he introduced on Second Reading. His argument was an argument for this Bill, and I think it was an extremely strong one, that it removes an anomaly. It removes the anomaly of a certain type of sentence, the sentence of hanging, for certain types of murder, in a situation where the existing legislation has removed that sentence for very many other types of murder.
This is an extremely strong argument for the Bill. As my hon. Friend said at the commencement of the discussions, we are not really here discussing the abolition of hanging as a principle. The principle has been conceded. We are really considering whether it should now remain for a few individual cases. This is an argument that we should not have an anomaly in the law. It seems to me that the basic principle behind the Amendment is similar, that one should not have an anomaly in the law. One says of all other types of crime that the judge who hears the case is responsible for the sentence. One provides by Statute for the maximum sentence, but gives the judge discretion to impose a sentence less than that maximum. He may not impose a greater one, but in almost all cases he has discretion to impose a lesser one.

Mr. Sydney Silverman: I think that my hon. Friend was not here during the earlier part of this debate when the Amendment was moved. He has probably forgotten what Amendment is now being supported by the hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies). It is the Amendment moved by the right hon. and learned Member for Epsom (Sir P. Rawlinson). It was an Amendment to put into the Bill power for the court to have discretion to impose a sentence of life imprisonment. So the only thing that would be achieved by this Amendment is not to give the court the power to impose a determinate sentence but to give it a power to impose a sentence of life imprisonment or no imprisonment at all. There is nothing in the Amendment to give the court any power to impose any other sentence.

Mr. English: With respect to my hon. Friend, I have read the OFFICIAL REPORT, which is a verbatim report of

all that was said upon this Amendment on the last occasion when it was discussed. I think that my hon. Friend will agree that, although that is his view of the effect of the Amendment, his view was immediately disputed by other hon. Members.

Mr. Silverman: My point was never answered.

Mr. English: The short answer to that is that this debate has not yet been finished.

Mr. Silverman: We have had five hours of it.

Mr. English: The point at issue is the intent behind the Amendment. As I stated before my hon. Friend interrupted me, he takes a different view of the law from those who support the Amendment, and that is something on which I think we as a House could well receive advice, and we may indeed do so, from hon. and learned Members of the House, one of whom, incidentally, has just spoken and who presumably takes a different view from that of my hon. Friend. The point that I am getting at is that one cannot argue the principle of a Bill as a principle to remove an anomaly from the law, the anomaly of hanging, of a definite individual sentence of hanging, and at the same time oppose an Amendment the intent and purport of which is to give the judges a power which they have in nearly all other existing cases under the law.
7.30 p.m.
The argument by way of removing an anomaly applies not merely in one way but in both. Therefore, unless I can be shown that my hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne is right on the point of law that he has raised—the majority of lawyers who have spoken so far do not seem to share his view—I do not think that I can in conscience support him, although I have supported him on every occasion during the proceedings of the Bill so far.
What is involved here goes far deeper than what it is possible to deal with by the Bill. There are strong arguments for looking at sentencing policy as a whole. It is not necessarily true that a judge who hears a case and is trained solely in the law and in no other aspects of the matter is the right person to determine the


sentence. There are some arguments for other sentencing policies than that which exists. I hope that my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary will look into these things one day.
But so long as the law for all other crimes is as it is, I hope that the House, in getting rid of hanging as an anomaly in the law, will retain the principle that applies to all other crimes. If that principle is wrong, then let us look at sentencing policy and methods as a whole, but that does not matter for this Bill. Meanwhile, if we are to say that murder should be treated like other crimes in one way I cannot see why it should not be so treated in respect of sentencing as well.

Sir John Hobson: The speech of the hon. Member for Nottingham, West (Mr. English) shows clearly that this question has nothing to do with whether one is a retentionist or an abolitionist. All we are discussing, assuming that the death penalty is abolished, is whether it is right that judges should do no more than pass an automatic sentence of life imprisonment or whether they should behave in the way they normally do in sentencing people who have committed other crimes, when they have a discretion as to whether to pass the maximum sentence or a lesser penalty.
In our previous discussion of this issue, the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) has tried to show that the Amendment does no more than give a judge discretion to pass a life sentence or nothing, but that view is absurd. Every crime which involves a maximum of life imprisonment is framed in a form of words stating that the defendant shall be liable to imprisonment for life. It is not necessary to state that such a person will also be liable to any lesser penalty. If it is necessary for clarification to adopt some other form of words in this case, and if the hon. Gentleman is so unhappy about it, then it can be done in the House of Lords. What we are discussing is the principle and not minor technicalities of the meaning of words.

Mr. Sydney Silverman: We are not dealing with minor technicalities. We are dealing with the power of a court to inflict a sentence for the gravest crime known to English law. It is necessary—I am sure everyone will agree about this

—that the power of the court should be clear. What we are discussing now is not some vague principle or other but the particular Amendment offered to us.
It is not true that, where a sentence is not mentioned, and mentioned to be discretionary, the court has the power to pass any lesser sentence. The court has no power to pass any sentence whatever except by Statute. There is nothing in this Bill to give it power to sentence a man to anything but life imprisonment, and if we make that discretionary then the court will have power to sentence to life imprisonment or not to sentence at all.
The cases the right hon. and learned Gentleman has in mind are Statute cases where life imprisonment is specifically stated to be the maximum. In this Amendment it is not stated to be the maximum. It is merely to be made a discretionary life sentence. I understand that this is not what the right hon. and learned Gentleman means. I understand what he means but the House is concerned with the Amendment.

Sir J. Hobson: rose—

Mr. Mark Carlisle: Would my right hon. and learned Friend—

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Order. The Chair does not like two successive interventions at once. I would also say to the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) that he must condense his interventions. He has made what is suspiciously like a second speech.

Sir J. Hobson: As I understand it, the words of the Amendment are almost uniform in almost every Statute of the 19th century which provide—not by this particular form of words but certainly provide—that the court shall pass such a sentence or less. If the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne refers to Arch-bold and other authorities he will see the words "liable to imprisonment for life" without any alternative provision for a lesser penalty.

Mr. Carlisle: Perhaps my right hon. and learned Friend will allow me to give an example. Dealing with the punishment for manslaughter, Section 5 of the Offences Against the Person Act says:
Whosoever shall be convicted of manslaughter shall be liable, at the discretion of


the court, to be kept in penal servitude for life.
The Larceny Act, 1916, states that a person found guilty of felony
shall be … liable to penal servitude for life".
The law dealing with burglary contains the same wording.

Sir J. Hobson: I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Runcorn (Mr. Carlisle) for producing those examples. I looked at them, of course, when drafting the Amendment. The point made by the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne is not only petty but wrong. It is ridiculous to try to divert the debate on a form of words used over a long period. It would be plain by our Amendment what the House meant and if clarification were necessary it could be put right. Let us carry out the intention of the House.
I believe that these words carry out that intention. They are traditional and are adequate for the purpose. What is much more important is not the form of words but whether we are to abolish one automatic sentence in order to substitute another or whether we are now to say that, while all other cases provide for the judge to decide the sentence on the seriousness of the crime, the same principle ought not to apply in the case of murder.
We were grateful to the Home Secretary for intervening on the last occasion when we debated this matter and for giving reasons why he supported the view that the word put in to fill the hole in the Bill should simply be "life" so that the court would have no discretion and a sentence of life imprisonment would be automatic on any charge of murder.
We realise that the right hon. and learned Gentleman was anxious not to detain the House long as it was getting near four o'clock, but he expressed his view clearly and I want to say why I find it very difficult to agree with his approach and the argument that he advanced for saying that every judge on every conviction of murder should do no more than pronounce an automatic sentence of life imprisonment.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman's proposition was that the proper sentence

for all murder was life imprisonment, but that is untrue. We know that the vast majority of murderers are at present released long before their life sentences expire. We know that a substantial minority are released after a very short time and everyone thinks it right that they should be. We know that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has announced his views that, unless there are very exceptional reasons—unless it is obviously essential for the safety of the public—after nine, 10, 11 or 12 years persons sentenced to life imprisonment should, if possible, be released. It is perfectly plain that the right hon. and learned Gentleman does not take the view that the proper sentence for murder is life, but what he is putting forward as his proposition is that this is the sentence which all courts ought to pass for everybody convicted of murder.
The second view which the Home Secretary seemed to be taking and which I found very surprising was that mercy was something which concerned the Home Secretary and not the judges. This is an astonishing view of the relationship between the judiciary and the Executive, and particularly an astonishing view of the functions of the judiciary.
The quality of mercy is not strained
was not intended to apply to the exercise only of the Home Secretary's powers. It is something which has always been regarded as part of the exercise of the powers of the judiciary. The quotation goes on to say:
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice".
Surely it is the great tradition of this country that the judges hold the balance between mercy and justice, and it is right that they should continue to do so in all cases, unless one has a situation in which the death penalty is being passed and when it might be said that it is too great a burden for a single individual to decide in his discretion between capital punishment and not capital punishment. With anything less than the death penalty, I cannot understand the view that it is for the Home Secretary and not for the judges to exercise mercy in appropriate cases.
Least of all can I understand the view the Home Secretary advanced, which the


hon. and learned Member for Montgomery (Mr. Hooson) also seemed to be advancing, that it is impossible at the time of sentence for the accused person to put forward all the mitigating circumstances which should be taken into account. True some might turn up later, but I would have thought that the experience of anybody who knows the courts was that it was of the greatest advantage to any accused man that at the end of his trial all the mitigating circumstances of his home and background and of the circumstances in which the crime was committed and what went on before, even though not relevant in the course of the trial, should be drawn to the attention of the judge.
There are particular advantages in doing it at that stage. The first is that it enables the accused person publicly to put forward matters of justification which would otherwise not be heard. If the automatic sentence is passed, there is no room for any mitigation and a man may be led down the steps of the dock with only those things which can be said against him having been mentioned in public and none of those things which could be said in his favour having also been said in public, so that he and his family and relations would live in a sense with one side of the story against him in the public mind while that which could be said in his favour would not be known to the public.
There is something else. I would have thought that experienced legal advisers and powerful advocates were useful people for putting forward the mitigating circumstances of a crime. Once he is inside the prison the accused will have no legal advice to put forward the mitigating circumstances. He will not have an advocate who will put them forward. While I appreciate that of course the Home Secretary has great resources and of course he will exercise great care and of course rely on his sources of information to consider everything which could be taken into account, nevertheless the fact remains that for some of the less serious types of murder, for some of those where inevitably anyone would expect the accused person to be released in the shortest possible time, it would be of the greatest benefit and the greatest advantage for mitigating circumstances on behalf of the accused to be put forward in public

at the end of the trial for the consideration of the judge, so that he could take them into account when passing sentence.
7.45 p.m.
The only argument which I can see against a discretionary sentence and in favour of an automatic sentence has been scarcely mentioned or used. It is the difficulty that those who have been convicted of murder may in future remain dangerous people and it may be difficult at the time of the trial for a judge at that moment to decide whether it is safe for such a person to be released. But this is true not only of murder, but of many other offences when people are accused of murder and convicted of some other and lesser offence. It is one with which the judges have always dealt and it is one which the public have thought it safe to leave in the hands of the judges and it is one with which Parliament deals by providing a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
The Amendment does not mean that judges will not pass life sentences. If a judge thought that there were the slightest risk that a man in future might be unsafe if released after a determinate sentence, he would pass a life sentence. That is exactly what the Amendment provides. It is intended that in the serious cases of wicked murders by wicked men, unlikely to be safe if released, the judge should pass and continue to pass a sentence of life imprisonment.
There must surely be room for the view that the judiciary should retain that discretion as to those sentences which are not automatic sentences and in which it is obvious, right and fair and expected that mercy should flow from the seat of justice. At the time of sentence the judge should be able to say that it is one of those cases in which mercy can be extended to an accused even though a convicted murderer. It is surely true that any judge is diminished if all he can do is to embark on a pantomime which has little meaning and little relation to the effects which are likely to occur as a result of the conviction of a murderer of that crime.
The view that every murderer ought to be sentenced to life automatically proceeds from the fallacious parrot-cry which we are constantly hearing—that murder


is a unique crime. I do not believe that it is. Many murders are unique crimes, but quite a few are not. After all, the difference between some murders and attempted murders is only that the former succeeded. What the accused did is precisely and exactly the same in each case, and yet on conviction for attempted murder the judge has to determine whether he ought to sentence the accused to life imprisonment, or whether it is safe to give him a determinate sentence and allow him out in a shorter time.
What is even more startling is that since 1957 any person convicted of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility is a person who has in fact committed the crime of murder but whose crime has been reduced to manslaughter by reason of the fact that he was suffering from such an abnormality of mind as substantially to impair his mental responsibility. It would have been thought that these would be the very people against whom the public would require protection and yet Parliament has left to the judges—I believe without complaint—a discretion as to whether they should pass a life sentence or a determinate and lesser sentence.
If it can be passed in the case of a man who has committed the crime of murder but who has been convicted of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility, I simply cannot understand why the judges should not also be allowed a discretion in those cases, of which we know there are many, when there are very great mitigating circumstances, when a respectable person who is never ever likely to commit an offence again has, perhaps because of being distraught, or a misguided sense of what is right and wrong, has taken the life of another.
Everyone knows of people who have finished the life of a near and dear one suffering from cancer, or of people who have got rid of a child above the age of one because the child was deformed and an utter burden to himself and his family. I need not mention any other circumstances which are technically murder but which nobody would regard as coming within the category of necessitating a life sentence under any circumstances.

Why we should not allow the judges to exercise that discretion and that mercy which they do in all other cases I find it very difficult to understand.
A man who is convicted of espionage may have put at risk the lives of thousands of his fellow countrymen by the secrets that he has disclosed to an enemy or the information that he has given about his country. He has put at peril himself, his country, and many of his colleagues, and yet we still think it right that the judge should have a discretion as to how long a sentence he should pass. It is for these reasons that I would have thought it right, in circumstances where there is to be no capital punishment for any murderer, to say that all murders are not of a type which requires life imprisonment and that it is therefore desirable that the judiciary should have the first opportunity of exercising the discretion of mercy if it thinks it safe to do so. It can still pass a sentence of life imprisonment, and then the question when the prisoner shall be released can be left to the Home Secretary and his advisers, unless we make other arrangements for the review of life sentences. I hope that for murders and other serious crimes we shall shortly move to a position in which a review body of some sort or another deals with all life sentences of, say, more than ten years or more than seven years.
In those circumstances, it would be equally right and fair that judges should pass very long sentences, and should also have power in appropriate cases to pass very short sentences, even in cases of murder. The great advantage would be that public justice would then be seen to have been done in the passing of sentences and we should not merely have a different form of pantomime. There is an advantage in the judge having discretion to mark the gravity of a wicked crime by passing a very heavy sentence and to mark those murders which are less serious by passing moderate or even short sentences.
If we provide that once a jury has pronounced a verdict of guilty all that the judge has to do is to sentence the convicted man automatically to life imprisonment, it means nothing to the accused person or his family or relatives, or to the public. It becomes the meaningless


pantomime which the promoters of the Bill have been endeavouring to abolish.

Mr. Ian Percival: The argument has been so fully and cogently put by my three hon. Friends, and I so fully agree with them, that I will confine myself to one point arising out of an intervention by the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman). I hope that the House will realise that the point that he made appears to be a thoroughly bad one. My hon. Friend the Member for Runcorn (Mr. Carlisle) drew attention to several Statutes which provide for the penalty of imprisonment for life. It is a very common one, and it is quite clear what it means. This form of penalty has been used in the Bill itself. That is the point to which I wish to draw attention.
It is remarkable to find the promoters of the Bill arguing against the Amendment when, in subsection (3), they have introduced the self-same provision in respect of sentencing serving men who are guilty of an offence corresponding to murder. Without going into the details of that subsection, I can say that it provides that a court, in sentencing a serving

soldier, airman or sailor, has discretion to fix any sentence, up to and including life imprisonment. Nobody versed in the law would dream of quarrelling with that proposition.

I suggest that it would be the last word in absurdity and anomaly to provide that a court sentencing a serving soldier, airman or sailor had the power or the duty—whichever way one looks at it—to fix a sentence up to and including life imprisonment and, at the same time, to provide automatically for a sentence of life imprisonment in the case of a civilian. This would introduce a further anomaly, unless the Amendment were carried. That is a further reason why it should be carried.

Mr. R. T. Paget: rose in his place and claimed to move, That the Question be now put.

Question, That the Question be now put, put and agreed to.

Question put accordingly, That "sentenced to imprisonment for" stand part of the Bill:—

The House divided: Ayes 193, Noes 92.

Division No. 252.]
AYES
[7.56 p.m.


Abse, Leo
Dunn, James A.
Howell, Denis (Small Heath)


Albu, Austen
Edwards, Rt. Hn. Ness (Caerphilly)
Howie, W.


Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)
Edwards, Robert (Bilston)
Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)


Alldritt, Walter
Ennals, David
Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)


Allen, scholefield (Crewe)
Ensor, David
Hunter, Adam (Dunfermline)


Atkinson, Norman
Evans, Ioan (Birmingham, Yardley)
Irving, Sydney (Dartford)


Bacon, Miss Alice
Fernyhough, E.
Jackson, Colin


Baxter, William
Finch, Harold (Bedwellty)
Jenkins, Hugh (Putney)


Beaney, Alan
Fitch, Alan (Wigan)
Jenkins, Rt. Hn. Roy (Stechford)


Bell, Ronald
Floud, Bernard
Johnson, Carol (Lewisham, S.)


Bence, Cyril
Foley, Maurice
Jones, Dan (Burnley)


Benn, Rt. Hn. Anthony Wedgwood
Foot, Sir Dingle (Ipswich)
Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)


Binns, John
Foot, Michael (Ebbw Vale)
Jones, T. W. (Merioneth)


Bishop, E. S.
Ford, Ben
Kenyon, Clifford


Blackburn, F.
Fraser, Rt. Hn. Tom (Hamilton)
Kerr, Mrs. Anne (R'ter &amp; Chatham)


Blenkinsop, Arthur
Ginsburg, David
Lawson, George


Bowden, Rt. Hn. H. W. (Leics S. W.)
Gregory, Arnold
Lewis, Arthur (West Ham. N.)


Bowen, Roderic (Cardigan)
Grey, Charles
Loughlin, Charles


Braddock, Mrs. E. M.
Griffiths, Rt. Hn. James (Llanelly)
Lubbock, Eric


Bray, Dr. Jeremy
Griffiths, Will (M'chester, Exchange)
McBride, Neil


Brown, Hugh D. (Glasgow, Provan)
Grimond, Rt. Hn. J.
McCann, J.


Brown, R. W. (Shoreditch &amp; Fbury)
Hale, Leslie
MacColl, James


Buchan, Norman (Renfrewshire, W.)
Hamilton, James (Bothwell)
MacDermot, Niall


Carmichael, Neil
Hamilton, William (West Fife)
Mclnnes, James


Castle, Rt. Hn. Barbara
Hamling, William (Woolwich, W.)
McKay, Mrs. Margaret


Chapman, Donald
Hannan, William
Mackie, George Y. (C'ness &amp; S'land)


Coleman, Donald
Harper, Joseph
Mackie, John (Enfield, E.)


Conlan, Bernard
Harrison, Walter (Wakefield)
Mahon, Peter (Preston, S.)


Crossman, Rt. Hn. R. H. S.
Hart, Mrs. Judith
Mahon, Simon (Bootle)


Dalyell, Tam
Hattersley, Roy
Mallalieu, E. L. (Brigg)


Davies, Ifor (Gower)
Hayman, F. H.
Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfield, E.)


Davies, S. O. (Merthyr)
Hazell, Bert
Manuel, Archie


de Freitas, Sir Geoffrey
Heffer, Eric S.
Mason, Roy


Delargy, Hugh
Herbison, Rt. Hn, Margaret
Maxwell, Robert


Dell, Edmund
Hobden, Dennis (Brighton, K'town)
Mellish, Robert


Diamond, Rt. Hn. John
Holman, Percy
Mendelson, J. J.


Dodds, Norman
Hooson, H. E.
Mikardo, Ian


Driberg, Tom
Howarth, Harry (Wellingborough)
Millan, Bruce


Duffy, Dr. A. E. P.
Howe, Geoffrey (Bebington)
Milne, Edward (Blyth)




Molloy, William
Reynolds, G. W.
Thornton, Ernest


Monslow, Walter
Rhodes, Geoffrey
Thorpe, Jeremy


Morris, Alfred (Wythenshawe)
Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)
Tinn, James


Murray, Albert
Robinson, Rt. Hn K. (St. Pancras, N.)
Urwin, T. W.


Newens, Stan
Rogers, George (Kensington, N.)
Varley, Eric G.


Noel-Baker, Francis (Swindon)
Rose, Paul B.
Walden, Brian (All Saints)


Noel-Baker, Rt. Hn. Philip (Derby, S.)
St. John-Stevas, Norman
Walker, Harold (Doncaster)


Norwood, Christopher
Shore, Peter (Stepney)
Wallace, George


Oakes, Gordon
Short, Rt. Hn. E. (N'c'tle-on-Tyne, C.)
Watkins, Tudor


Ogden, Eric
Short, Mrs. Renée (W'hampton, N. E.)
Wells, William (Walsall, N.)


O'Malley, Brian
Silkin, John (Deptford)
White, Mrs. Eirene


Oram, Albert E. (E. Ham, S.)
Silverman, Julius (Aston)
Whitlock, William


Orbach, Maurice
Silverman, Sydney (Nelson)
Wilkins, W. A.


Orme, Stanley
Skeffington, Arthur
Willey, Rt. Hn. Frederick


Oswald, Thomas
Slater, Mrs. Harriet (Stoke, N.)
Williams, Alan (Swansea, W.)


Page, Derek (King's Lynn)
Slater, Joseph (Sedgefield)
Williams, Clifford (Abertillery)


Paget, R. T.
Small, William
Williams, Mrs. Shirley (Hitchin)


Pannell, Rt. Hn. Charles
Snow, Julian
Willis, George (Edinburgh, E.)


Parker, John
Soskice, Rt. Hn. Sir Frank
Wilson, William (Coventry, S.)


Parkin, B. T.
Spriggs, Leslie
Winterbottom, R. E.


Pavitt, Laurence
Stainton, Keith
Woodburn, Rt. Hn. A.


Pearson, Arthur (Pontypridd)
Steel, David (Roxburgh)
Zilliacus, K.


Pentland, Norman
Steele, Thomas (Dunbartonshire, W.)



Perry, Ernest G.
Stones, William
TELLERS FOR THE AYES:


Probert, Arthur
Swain, Thomas
Mr. Richard Crawshaw and


Randall, Harry
Swingler, Stephen
Mr. S. C. Silkin.


Rees, Merlyn
Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)





NOES


Anstruther-Gray, Rt. Hn. Sir W.
Glyn, Sir Richard
Osborne, Sir Cyril (Louth)


Atkins, Humphrey
Grant-Ferris, R.
Page, John (Harrow, W.)


Baker, W. H. K.
Grieve, Percy
Page, R. Graham (Crosby)


Barlow, Sir John
Griffiths, Peter (Smethwick)
Percival, Ian


Bessell, Peter
Hall-Davis, A. G. F.
Pickthorn, Rt. Hn. Sir Kenneth


Braine, Bernard
Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N. W.)
Pitt, Dame Edith


Bullus, Sir Eric
Harvey, Sir Arthur Vere (Macclesf'd)
Rawlinson, Rt. Hn. Sir Peter


Butcher, Sir Herbert
Harvie Anderson, Miss
Rees-Davies, W. R.


Campbell, Gordon
Hawkins, Paul
Renton, Rt. Hn. Sir David


Carlisle, Mark
Hill, J. E. B. (S. Norfolk)
Sharples, Richard


Clarke, Brig. Terence (Portsmth, W.)
Hobson, Rt. Hn. Sir John
Sinclair, Sir George


Cole, Norman
Hordern, Peter
Stanley, Hn. Richard


Corfield, F. V.
Hornsby-Smith, Rt. Hn. Dame P.
Stodart, Anthony


Crowder, F. P.
Howard, Hn. G. R. (St. Ives)
Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)


Cunningham, Sir Knox
Howarth, Robert L. (Bolton, E.)
Taylor, Edward M. (G'gow, Cathcart)


Dalkeith, Earl of
Kimball, Marcus
Teeling, Sir William


Dean, Paul
King, Evelyn (Dorset, S.)
Temple, John M.


Deedes, Rt. Hn. W. F.
Lagden, Godfrey
Thatcher, Mrs. Margaret


Digby, Simon Wingfield
Lewis, Kenneth (Rutland)
Tuck, Raphael


Dodds-Parker, Douglas
McAdden, Sir Stephen
Turton, Rt. Hn. R. H.


Drayson, G. B.
MacArthur, Ian
Tweedsmuir, Lady


Eden, Sir John
Mathew, Robert
Wall, Patrick


Elliot, Capt. Walter (Carshalton)
Maude, Angus
Ward, Dame Irene


Emery, Peter
Mawby, Ray
Wills, Sir Gerald (Bridgwater)


English, Michael
Maydon, Lt.-Cmdr. S. L. C.
Wise, A. R.


Fletcher-Cooke, Sir John (S'pton)
Mills, Peter (Torrington)
Wood, Rt. Hn. Richard


Galbraith, Hn. T. G. D.
Mitchell, David
Woodnutt, Mark


Gammans, Lady
Monro, Hector
Wylie, N. R.


Gardner, Edward
Mott-Radclyffe, Sir Charles



Gibson-Watt, David
Munro-Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh
TELLERS FOR THE NOES:


Giles, Read-Admiral Morgan
Murton, Oscar
Sir R. Thompson and


Gilmour, Sir John (East Fife)
Noble, Rt. Hn. Michael
Sir Rolf Dudley Williams.

Mr. Sydney Silverman: I beg to move Amendment No. 6, Clause 1, in page 1, line 7, at the end to insert "life".

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: The hon. Member for Nelson and Colne has suggested that we should take with this Amendment the Amendment in the name of the hon. Member for Oxford (Mr. Woodhouse), in page 1, line 7, at the end to insert:
Such a sentence shall be of indefinite duration subject only to the prerogative of mercy.
I am in some difficulty, because the hon. Gentleman—[Interruption.] Order. The

hon. Member for Oxford has just come in, so I will repeat what I have said. The hon. Member for Nelson and Colne has suggested to me that we should take, with Amendment No. 6, Amendment No. 9, for a single debate. I have no objection to that, if the hon. Member for Oxford has no objection and the House has no objection. I am guided by the House.

Mr. Christopher Woodhouse: I have no objection, Mr. Deputy-Speaker.

Mr. Silverman: I propose to do more than move the Amendment


virtually formally. The House will remember that, in Committee, by a series of events which I do not need to resume now, a gap was left in the Clause, so that Clause I says that a man convicted of murder shall be "sentenced to imprisonment for". What we have been concerned with in the last two Amendments and what we are concerned with in this one is to fill in that gap. The arguments for and against filling it in with the word "life" have been canvassed exhaustively and repeatedly over many weeks and months and, recently, over many days. I do not believe that I could assist the House one little bit by attempting to state again the arguments in favour or to deploy again the arguments against.
The House has already disposed of every other suggested alternative, so, if the House were to reject this Amendment to fill in the gap with the word "life", we should then be left with an Act of Parliament which imprisoned nobody at all for any period whatever. Since we have exhausted all the other alternatives which have been proposed, it seems that the House has no remaining alternative but to accept my Amendment. Until the word "life" is put back into the Clause, there is nothing to which the hon. Member for Oxford (Mr. Woodhouse) can attach the gloss which he wishes to attach.

Mr. Woodhouse: I should like to add to what the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) has said the fact that I entirely support his Amendment, without which—as he has rightly pointed out—my Amendment would be meaningless. I hope that, as I am prepared to support his Amendment, he may be prepared to support mine.
My Amendment introduces a new principle which, for various incidental reasons, has not previously been discussed at any stage of the Bill. I should like to emphasise the fact that the Amendment is not a last-minute afterthought. It was on the Notice Paper at a much earlier stage of the Bill, but it fell by mischance, because of the lacuna created in Committee.
My Amendment offers the House—and this is why I hope the sponsors of the Bill will accept it—the last opportunity seriously to consider the question of an

alternative deterrent penalty in place of the capital sentence. It differs from all those which have previously been put forward and discussed on this point in Clause 1 in that it makes no reference to the courts. That is deliberate and I entirely accept the arguments which were adduced by the Home Secretary in rebuttal of previous Amendments which sought to leave the determination of sentences in one way or another to the courts.
My Amendment also differs from previous Amendments in that this is, I think, the first Amendment to Clause 1 that has been put down by an hon. Member on this side of the House who supported the Bill on Second Reading. I have done so because I believe that there is a special onus on the supporters of the Bill to seek to provide a new and adequate deterrent to murder in place of the sentence which the Bill seeks to abolish.
I believe that deterrence is indeed the crux of the whole matter and that it has been in danger in earlier stages of being obscured by emotional arguments of particular cases from the past or imaginary cases in the future. We should not be arguing that one side supports a barbarous and obscene practice or that the other side is inclined to show more sympathy for the killer than the victim. These arguments are by the way. We should be arguing about the best way to protect society in future from murder. We must, therefore, seek a new and effective deterrent, which is what the sponsors of the Bill have not yet done but which the Amendment seeks to do.
My Amendment rests on a quite simple assumption about deterrence. Deterrence does not lie in the threat of what we will do to the potential transgressor if he commits the transgression defined. Still less does deterrence lie in the execution of that threat when he has committed the transgression, because obviously a threat which must be executed has failed to deter. Deterrence lies in a presumption in the mind of the potential criminal—and it does not matter, for the purpose of the argument or the effectiveness of the deterrent, whether or not that presumption is correct. It is the existence of the presumption in the mind of the potential criminal that is crucial and decisive.
I therefore seek in the Amendment to establish in the mind of a potential


murderer that if he commits a murder he is unlikely ever to be a free man again. I emphasise, lest I be accused of inhumanity, that the Amendment does not exclude the possibility that a convicted murderer may be released one day. It merely seeks to establish a strong presumption to the contrary in his mind. I repeat; it is the presumption in his mind that counts and the presumption alone in creating deterrence.
8.15 p.m.
I seek to establish this presumption in a very simple way. No doubt the Home Secretary will tell me, with the wisdom and experience of the Parliamentary draftsmen behind him, that I have failed in my intention. That is a common experience of back benchers in drafting Amendments. However, it seemed to me that the intention must be put in an extremely simple form of words if it is to be embodied in a Statute. Otherwise the essential presumption will fail to be established in the often rather crude minds of those whom we are principally concerned to deter.
I have, therefore, stated in the Amendment that a life sentence shall be presumed to mean literally a life sentence—just as death by hanging in the past meant death by hanging. I have said it with the same extremely limited qualification: namely, the possibility of reprieve by the exercise of the Prerogative of mercy on the advice of the Home Secretary. Naturally, in practice, the Prerogative would normally be exercised under my Amendment, if it were exercised at all, not immediately, as it is in the case of capital punishment today, but only after an elapse of time.
I hope that the Home Secretary will not say that the words of my Amendment make no difference to the existing law. I consulted a former Law Officer on this point before tabling the Amendment and, although he was at first disposed to argue that this made no difference to the existing law, he later conceded that it did. The words of the Amendment are intended to make the Home Secretary's decision to release a convicted murderer a much more difficult decision to take—not an impossible decision, but a much more difficult one—because this is essentially

the kind of deterrence which I am seeking to create.
The words will make the decision more difficult by taking away the existing power to release a convicted man on licence and compelling the Home Secretary, if he releases a convicted murderer at all, to do so absolutely and finally—therefore, to do so only after the very elaborate, anxious and soul-searching process of the Prerogative.
The difference between my Amendment and the existing law is that a criminal released on licence can be recalled, whereas a criminal recalled under the Prerogative could not, and, therefore, the Home Secretary would be bound to think more than twice before releasing a convicted murderer, especially in very touch cases. The Amendment will, as I say, decrease the probability of release and increase the potential murderer's fear that he will never be a free man again. Therein lies the proposed deterrent effect which, I hope, is obvious in the words of the Amendment.
There is a great difficulty in almost all arguments on this matter. It is that one cannot prove any case by concrete instances or statistics. Statistics can tell us nothing about the effectiveness of any particular deterrent, because statistics are available only for cases where the deterrent has failed. There are no statistics for the occasions when a deterrent has succeeded.
I believe that, in connection with the Amendment, one crucial case can be quoted to show where it might and, I suggest, almost certainly would, have prevented at least one murder from taking place. I use this case as an illustration and not as part of my substantive reason. The case occurred last year, and any hon. Members interested can find the details accurately reported in the Observer of 15th March, 1964. It was the only case of a man who was ever convicted and reprieved for a second capital murder after having been convicted and reprieved for an earlier murder. After the first murder and the first reprieve, and after some years in prison, this man was released on licence under Section 27 of the 1952 Act, making use of the power I seek to eliminate.
The man was subsequently brought to court again after attacking his wife. He


was convicted, on pleading guilty of unlawful possession of a firearm. The judge then, after some hesitation, instead of sending the man to prison, put him on probation. This may seem a surprising decision for a judge to have taken, but once the court had so decided it became, in my submission, morally impossible for my right hon. Friend who was then Home Secretary to revoke the licence and recall the man to prison. The man, having been left at liberty by the court, subsequently committed a second murder, for which he was again convicted, again sentenced to death, and again reprieved.
My reason for quoting the case is that under my Amendment the second murder would probably never have happened, as the Home Secretary would have had no power to release this man on licence, subject to recall, but only to release him under the Prerogative, and since there was obviously some element of risk in releasing him at all, and since that risk would have been very much greater had my Amendment then formed part of the law, it seems to me extremely unlikely that the risk would have been taken. I suggest that by virtue of the form of words I propose, the House is able to find the only way in which that particular second murder, or any murder comparable to it, could have been prevented without hanging the criminal after the first murder.
To generalise the matter, I wish to make it much more difficult for the Home Secretary to release a murderer, though not wholly impossible, and I wish this fact of the increased difficulty to be established in the mind of the potential murderer by simple words written into the Statute. These words would put life sentences on all fours with existing capital sentences, subject to the same conditions, the same qualifications, and the same safeguards. The only difference would be that the exercise of the Prerogative, if exercised at all, would not necessarily be immediate—though, of course, it might be immediate in exceptional and compassionate cases, when one assumes that it would be immediate.
I put this Amendment forward because, although I agree with the sponsors of the Bill in hoping that we shall abolish capital punishment, I part company with them by agreeing with many of

my hon. Friends in believing that it is not ridiculous or perverse to argue that there can be such a thing as a deterrent to murder. It is easy to quote cases, and many of them, in which the deterrent has failed, and in which probably any deterrent would fail, but it is also possible to believe that there may be some cases, however few, in which it has succeeded, and, however few they may be, it is those cases that are crucial, and it is those cases to which we should address ourselves.
I accept it as demonstrated that capital punishment has failed again and again and again as a deterrent. I agree in finding it repulsive as a deterrent. But it does not follow that the prospect of a life sentence that is more likely than not to be a real life sentence would also fail as a deterrent. Indeed, if it is true, as it is often argued, that to incarcerate a man for the rest of his natural life is a more terrible punishment than death—not an argument I support, but one frequently advanced—a life sentence would to that extent be a more powerful deterrent than capital punishment. I do not go as far as to claim that, but I consider that the onus rests on the abolitionists, of whom in the Second Reading debate I was one, to face the problem of deterrence. It is because the sponsors have failed to do that in the past that I beg to move this Amendment.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Samuel Storey): The hon. Member cannot at the present moment move his Amendment. We are only discussing the Amendments together. He will have an opportunity later of doing so.

Rear-Admiral Morgan Giles: I regret that I cannot support the Amendment in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford (Mr. Woodhouse). I want to speak against Amendment No. 6, Clause 1, moved by the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman). We have heard hon. and learned Members on both sides of the House deploying, with their usual skill which makes it a pleasure to listen, all the arguments for and against the various ways in which they existing hole in the Bill should be plugged. We must ask ourselves: What do the ordinary people think about it? The ordinary people think that life imprisonment


should mean imprisonment for life, and nothing else whatsoever. All our constituents, when we meet them next weekend, will expect us to explain that when we say in a Bill "life imprisonment". we mean that the criminal shall be imprisoned for the duration of his natural life.
On the other hand, perhaps the one point upon which retentionists and abolitionists alike agree is that genuine imprisonment for the duration of a man's life is not an appropriate sentence in all cases of murder. Therefore, I cannot agree with the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne that we are now in a position where a life sentence is the only appropriate way of filling the hole in the Bill. He is quite wrong in saying that we have no alternative in this matter.

Mr. Sydney Silverman: When I said that it was the only alternative I meant that it was the only alternative left undisposed of on the Notice Paper. If there is another one will the hon. and gallant Gentleman tell us what it is?

Rear-Admiral Giles: Yes, I will with pleasure. I think the alternative is to send the Bill to another place with the existing hole in it because I would hope that wiser counsels would prevail in another place by this time.

8.30 p.m.

Sir F. Soskice: I do not think I have much to add to what has been said in answer to the arguments addressed by the hon. and gallant Member for Winchester (Rear-Admiral Morgan Giles) because I should have thought that, subject to his suggestion just made, we had adequately explored them.
What I should like to do is to address some observations to the House in answer to the argument advanced by the hon. Member for Oxford (Mr. Woodhouse). He spoke cogently and with obvious feeling, and he had quite obviously given a great deal of thought to this matter. His thought was backed by his experience as a Minister. I hope the House will not accept his Amendment, and I shall try to say why. It is perfectly true that his Amendment might have the effect of making less likely, at any rate for a period of time in the earlier part of a life sentence, that the person sentenced to life

imprisonment would be released. That may or may not be the case; it depends on the circumstances.
I think the drafting of the Amendment is adequate to achieve the purpose which the hon. Member has in mind. The purpose the hon. Member has in mind, as he explained very clearly, is that there should be much less prospect, and that it should be apparent to the intending killer, that he would be released from a life sentence than if his prospects depended on the exercise of the discretion under Section 27 of the 1952 Act. First, the hon. Member supported his argument on the basis that there must be an adequate deterrent. I have previously said that, at any rate in the view which I and I think a number of hon. Members hold, the real deterrent is the certainty of conviction. That, I think, is a more effective deterrent than any other. If a person knew for certain that in the event of his committing a serious crime he would serve at least nine years in prison—if he thought that was a near certainty—it would be the most powerful deterrent one could think of.
Quite apart from that, in previous debates I have endeavoured to make it plain on the score of deterrence, and I repeat it, that so long as I hold my office—and I think I can speak for my predecessors and those likely to come after me—we would keep murderers in prison as long as necessary to protect society, however long that means and however reluctant we might personally feel if faced with the necessity of keeping any human being incarcerated for a great number of years. The nine year sentence, which has become so much spoken about in popular parlance on these matters, is a bit of a fiction. The average is not nine years. As I have said on previous occasions, the nine years, experience shows, is round about the time when one may begin to get symptoms to show that the person in prison is beginning to break down. Therefore, in practice a number of persons have been released after nine years in prison.
They are generally people who were sentenced to death before the 1957 Act and in whose case ex hypothesi there was some ground for a merciful view which led to their being reprieved after having been sentenced to death. Those are the people who, broadly speaking,


have been let out after nine years. It does not follow that hereafter murderers with no mitigating circumstances in their cases who are sentenced to life imprisonment may expect to be let out after nine years. They may have to serve considerably longer. I take the view that a man should not be kept in prison any longer than is necessary for protecting society, but they may have to serve for longer.
I feel, therefore, that my successors would agree that in rare cases—I hope to heaven they may be few and far between—it may be necessary even to keep a person in prison for life. It is a terrible thing to decide for any living soul that one may do that to him—extinguish all hope in him. I know it is a thing which anyone would do with the utmost reluctance and distaste. On the score of deterrence, if it is necessary to keep a person in prison for a long number of years to protect society, I hope it will be well known and understood that he will be kept in prison for that time.
That is my answer to the hon. Member for Oxford on the score of deterrence. First let us try, as I am trying to the best of my ability, to increase the likelihood of discovery and apprehension and conviction. Second, let it be clearly understood that the interest and safety of the community come first. It is only subject to that that one looks for grounds for mercy in deciding whether and when one will let a person out under Section 27 of the 1952 Act.
The hon. Gentleman said that he had been advised that the effect of the Amendment, substituting the prerogative of mercy for the exercise of discretion under Section 27, would indeed be that it would be much less likely that a prisoner would be released from prison. As I have said, in the earlier stages possibly that would be so. Home Secretaries according to precedent recommend the exercise of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy only rarely. It has been exercised in the case of death sentences, as I have said, when there are mitigating circumstances, or possibly some ground of doubt, or some similar reason. I accept it from the hon. Gentleman that the Royal Prerogative of Mercy is only rarely recommended, and then on very strong grounds.
I ask the House to suppose that a Section 27 discretion were not available. Let

us suppose that Section 27 of the 1952 Act had never been passed and that a Home Secretary was confronted with the case of a man who had been in prison for 11 years. Let us assume that it was made plain by the reports on that man that he had reached breaking point, that he was likely to break down if he were kept in any longer, that he would be driven out of his mind if he were kept in any longer. If it was not perfectly apparent that it was obsolutely necessary in the interests of society that the man should be kept in any longer, I should have thought that few Home Secretaries in those circumstances would hesitate to take the decision of recommending to the Sovereign that the exercise of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy would be appropriate.
It seems to me to be a serious defect in the hon. Gentleman's proposal that the effect of the exercise of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy is that the man goes free once and for all. There is no power to recall him. The power to let him out on licence which is given by Section 27 of the 1952 Act is radically different from the jurisdiction to recommend to the Sovereign the exercise of the Royal Prerogative. If the man is let out under Section 27, as has been said many times in our debates on the Bill, he can be recalled. If he shows symptoms which give rise to a suspicion that he is still a danger to society, he can be recalled. Prisoners released under Section 27 have on a number of occasions been recalled when their conduct in freedom gives rise to some anxiety as to whether they can properly be left at large.
I should have thought that it was certainly not in the interests of the community that that power should be forgone. If a man has committed a murder and deliberately taken the life of a fellow human being—I repeat that murder is still the most terrible crime in the calendar—great care must be taken before deciding that he can be set at large again. It is essential in the interests of society that the Home Secretary who sets him at large should retain the power to recall him. If the man shows by his behaviour—by truculence, by refusal to comply with conditions imposed upon him, by conduct which may indicate that he still has violent, ungovernable tendencies—that he is possibly still a danger to society there


must in the interests of society be a power to recall him to prison.
If the Amendment of the hon. Member for Oxford were accepted—the hon. Gentleman indicated that this was part of the argument he advanced—that power would go. I earnestly put it to the House that that would not be in the public interest. Therefore, I say in a few words in answer to the hon. Gentleman's Amendment that the fatal defect in his proposal is that, whatever other result his Amendment would have, it would take away the power to recall on licence. I submit that that power must be kept, in the interests of society, for the purpose of securing society against the possible recurrence of violent tendencies, temper or rage, so that the hand of the Home Secretary can, if necessary, be put on the person he has set at large and that person can be brought back to prison if the safety of society requires it.
For these reasons, I hope the House will think that, although the hon. Gentleman made a powerful case and has obviously devoted a great deal of thought to this matter, his proposal ought not, in the interests of society, to be accepted.

Sir Richard Glyn: I find myself unable to support the Amendment moved by the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) because I feel most strongly that to make the court automatically sentence every convicted murderer to a sentence of imprisonment for life would be as useless and idle a form of words as the form of words which the court up to the present has felt bound to use and which everyone, including the prisoner, has known was virtually meaningless.
I believe that in effect it would bring the court into contempt in the view of the public. It would mean that each and every murderer, regardless of the degree of criminality and the degree of offence—because there are degrees of the offence of murder—would all automatically receive in the court a sentence with the same form of words, whether it was one of those technical murders so well described by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Sir J. Hobson) or whether it was a murder of the most horrific nature which would shock the conscience.
For these murderers, so very different in quality, having committed crimes so different in criminality, to be sentenced with a parrot formula of words would simply pass the duty of imposing the sentence in effect to the Home Secretary. This would be most unfortunate. It would have absolutely no deterrent effect at all. Nobody knows what a life sentence means. Since this Bill has been before the House we have had questions on the subject. We know that murderers—I do not say it was wrong—convicted to life sentence have been released after as little as eight months. We know others have been detained for as long as nine years and occasionally more. The Home Secretary was right in saying that the average was not nine years. He did not say what it was. I think the truth is that it is substantially less than nine years. However, perhaps that does not matter.
The point is that a murderer sentenced to life imprisonment goes downstairs from the dock without the slightest idea how long he is going to be incarcerated, how long it will take him to pay his debt to society. He has no opportunity of appealing against the length of a determinate sentence which the court might otherwise have imposed. As has been properly pointed out, in the case of a murderer defended on a defence certificate, there would be no possibility of a plea in mitigation being made because it would be wholly inappropriate if only one sentence is available. It would be a waste of public money and of the time of the court. Therefore, a great number of points in favour of the prisoner would not be brought out in public at the time of the trial, and I believe that every prisoner is entitled to this. If Amendment No. 6 is accepted I do not see how he will have this simple act of justice.
But the matter goes further than that, because I believe that the sentence imposed by the court and the sentence as sustained by the convicted criminal should depend not only on the personality of the criminal, not only on what may be his or her breaking point. It should reflect in some degree the extent of his or her crime. Murderers vary, and those of us who have had to defend murderers and murderesses know how much they vary in what I describe as quality of criminality.
8.45 p.m.
It seems to me to be absolutely inappropriate that a person who has committed a murder so shocking as to horrify the public should be shuffled off down to the cells with the same idle formula as the court, if the Amendment were passed, would be forced to employ on someone who had committed what was only a technical murder and who was the person for whom everybody in the court who new the facts had the utmost sympathy.
The hon. Member for Nelson and Colne is absolutely right that we have got into a position here where we can do nothing about this, but I hope that another place will see that this is put right. I believe that this life sentence has absolutely no element of deterrent in it at all for the particular type of person who has been deterred up to the present by the situation which we have had up to now. This is a fact. I refer to the criminal. In this country criminals do not often commit murder whereas, in other countries unfortunately they often do and have done regularly. Some of us think that this is because of the deterrent effect in this country of the penalty under the 1957 Act, which will no longer apply if this Bill becomes law.
I do not think that a life sentence in the form which we have heard about will have any deterrent effect on these people in the future. Where we have had gang trouble in London and criminals have used firearms it has been repeatedly reported in the papers that they have been careful to shoot each other below the knee where it causes the maximum pain and inconvenience but the least possible danger to life. This has been the position up to now and I should like to think that it will continue, but I believe that it has existed only because of the real deterrent which we have had up to the present. I do not believe in a life sentence where people know that if they are fortunate in the experts or psychologists or whoever advises the Home Secretary taking the view that they are near breaking point they will be released at an early stage and perhaps only after a relatively short time.
The Home Secretary has assured us, and we entirely accept his word, that

in his view people will be kept in prison as long as is necessary. But how can anyone be sure how long is necessary? This is the whole difficulty. As many books testify, many prisoners of war succeeded in completely deceiving their captors, the enemy, into being allowed back to this country in the belief that they had become human wrecks, and they were back fighting in three months. This has happened many times.
I was in court, though I was not involved in the case, during the trial of the infamous murderer, Haigh, which many of us remember. One of the leading psychologists in this country was persuaded and gave evidence that his crimes were not crimes for which he was wholly responsible and there were many stories, which I will not repeat, of hallucinations, imagination and dreams. This psychologist, a man of the highest possible professional standing, was asked which of the crimes that Haigh had committed was a crime from which he had not gained financially. He could not answer at all and that was the end of that expert under cross-examination.
But an expert who advises the Home Secretary is not cross-examined. This happens behind closed doors. I this Amendment becomes law the most important and crucial part of the trial, the real vital moment when the length of sentence is decided, will not take place in the court. It will take place somewhere, who knows where, at some time, who knows when, and some expert, who knows who, will give an opinion to the Home Secretary which he will feel bound to accept, and on that the murderer will be released.
Here I support my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford (Mr. Woodhouse). His wording, "a sentence of indefinite duration", would help to stiffen the expression "life sentence" which means nothing to the criminal who really knows. It may mean something to the public, who may be misled or misunderstand what it means, but the criminal element knows exactly what "life sentence" means—a toss-up. I am sure that the wording, "a sentence of indefinite duration", would be of help, and, with great respect, I do not consider that the Home Secretary's objection to it is altogether well founded.
The procedure of release on licence is not nearly so valuable in the case of a murderer as it is in the case of a thief or a person engaged in regular criminal practices. Fortunately, there are not many people who regularly commit murder—not yet, anyway. The right hon. and learned Gentleman pays great regard to the power of recall. How many released murderers have been recalled? One does not often hear this mentioned. I wonder how many have been recalled. If this power is not often used, the right to recall is clearly less important than we had been led to believe.
I feel strongly that if the only penalty for a convicted murderer in the future is to be that which is covered by the phrase "imprisonment for life", which has become idle and meaningless, it will wholly fail to carry out the intentions stated in the Title of the Bill
to make further provision for … punishment
and it will be wholly inadequate as a deterrent. In addition, it will be a most unfortunate and undesirable form of words to force the court to use in every case regardless of the circumstances.

Mr. F. P. Crowder: My hon. Friend the Member for Oxford (Mr. Woodhouse) said—these were his words—that capital punishment has failed again and again as a deterrent. I entirely agree. But has my hon. Friend considered the other aspect of the matter, that, without anyone knowing, capital punishment has succeeded again and again as a deterrent? One does not know how many people have been killed since this Bill was brought before the House of Commons because the deterrent has been removed. That is a statistic which is not available to the House. I have read or know of certain cases which lead one to think that if the Bill had not been introduced quite a number of people would still be alive in England today. That is the responsibility which the promoter of the Bill and those who support him carry on their shoulders tonight.

Mr. Walter Monslow: Rubbish.

Mr. Crowder: The hon. Gentleman says, "Rubbish". He might have a little

more regard for human life. He and those who support him in the House have paid a lot of regard to financial measures over the past month, but apparently when the House turns to discuss human life everything has to be cut short with words like "rubbish". That is typical of the attitude of some hon. Members who support the Bill.
I come now to the word "life". What we are being asked to do is to insert into the Bill a word which means precisely nothing. It does not mean what it says, which is, in effect, natural life. The average member of the public, when he hears that a man has been sentenced to life imprisonment, imagines, prima facie, that that man having committed the dreadful crime of murder is to remain in prison until he dies. We now know that it means nothing of the sort.
It is thought in the Press and in the country that life, on an average, means something like nine or ten years, and, before we come to vote on the matter, I hope we shall have the advantage of hearing what the Home Secretary has to say. I ask him this question because I have no doubt he has gone into the figures most carefully. What is the average term served by a man convicted of murder?
One appreciates that in the main, on that basis, one is dealing with people who have been reprieved, and I suppose those who are sentenced to life imprisonment today, apart from the very bad cases, will fall into that category. I remember many years ago when I was first called to the Bar that I defended a quiet, unassuming little man at London Sessions. He had drunk too much and kicked in a plate-glass window. I told him that he had no option and must plead guilty. He said, "Yes, of course I will." I asked him if he had any previous convictions, because they were bound to know about them, and he said, "No. Nothing of that sort at all." I asked him if he was quite sure, and then he said, "Well, there was one." It turned out to be for murder, and he had been reprieved. I noticed he had served nine years. In the conversation I had with him, quite obviously he should only have served about two or three, if that; one does not know the circumstances of his offence.
I know the Home Secretary will correct me if I am wrong, but the view is generally held in the legal profession that if a man, previous to the Bills which have been before the House in recent years, was sentenced to death and then reprieved, provided there were no extenuating circumstances one way or the other, generally speaking he usually served a sentence of something in the region of nine years, and it could run to 12 years. The reason was not because the Home Secretary was being in any way merciful in connection with an offence, and not that he was looking at the mitigating circumstances which surrounded the particular offence of murder itself—and, of course, cases of murder vary in degree quite enormously—but on the basis that if a perfectly normal person is kept within the precincts of a prison for more than nine or ten years he becomes utterly useless to society thereafter.
So, when we come to this word "life" it is only right that before the House puts a word of this importance into the Bill it should know exactly what it means. I think the Home Secretary should first of all tell us whether it is right that, so far as reprieved prisoners were concerned, generally speaking nine years was the average term usually served, only because they would be useless to society afterwards if they were kept in any longer. Secondly—and this is most important—the Home Secretary should tell us what "life" is going to mean in future.
In the old days when people were sentenced to death one of the first duties of a High Court judge, having passed that sentence, was to write a letter to the Home Secretary describing his views of the case and every detail he could bring to bear upon it in connection with the particular surrounding circumstances of that case. I remember that when I was marshal to a judge about 20 years ago it was one of the first things he had to sit down and do.
What is going to happen in the future? My right hon. and learned Friend used the current expression, "life", and it means nothing. A man who is sentenced to life does not have the advantage of people being able to plead for him before the court and call evidence in mitigation.
9.0 p.m.
I should like to know whether that is to be a practice of the courts in the future. Very often, once a man has been convicted of something he will completely change his tune and line of action. He can, in those circumstances, tell his solicitor and counsel mitigating features of the case, which can be of quite enormous importance. Is it not right that if that be the case those matters after conviction and sentence should be put before the court, and put before the court in the strongest terms, and, if need be, evidence called in support of them?
I now ask the Home Secretary: when in due course he comes to consider how long "life" is to be, will he have in his hands a memorandum and report from the trial judge as to what his views are on the case? That may raise a rather important question. Again I ask the Home Secretary: how soon does he consider how long to keep a man in prison? Does he do it immediately the man is given this meaningless sentence of life imprisonment? Does he wait a matter of months, or does he wait a matter of years? In view of this word, which is of such importance, those are questions to which the House ought to know the answer before we dream of passing the Amendment.
Equally, how soon do the inquiries begin? Do the Home Secretary's officials, immediately a man has been sentenced to life imprisonment, go and see his solicitors? Do they have the advantage of the advice of counsel who appeared for him at the trial? Time and time again there must be within the knowledge of counsel and solicitors mitigating factors, surrounding circumstances, of the greatest possible assistance and importance to the man. Finally, I ask the Home Secretary: will he in these circumstances ask the trial judge to send him the memorandum which used to be sent in the days when people were sentenced to death?
If the Home Secretary can satisfy me and my right hon. and hon. Friends that if the Bill ever becomes law the judge will have the opportunity of hearing counsel and evidence, if need be, in mitigation, and after that the transcript of what is said in court will be forwarded to the Home Secretary, together with the views of the judge, on the basis of his experience, about


the case, having actually seen the defendant, possibly in the witness box under cross-examination, and having had much closer insight, having been there and seen the man, who is a mere name to the Home Secretary in the flesh standing his trial? Can we have an undertaking that in future if "life" is put into the Bill that is the sort of procedure that will be adopted?
Here I join with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Sir J. Hobson). Is it not right that once a man has been convicted by a jury of murder he should have every possible chance? It is, of course, no longer open to me, owing to the Rules of Procedure of the House, in any way to discuss the last Amendment. It was cut short by the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) who, with other hon. Members, presumably wants to get the Bill through as quickly as he can without any further ado. I hope I do not do the hon. and learned Gentleman any injustice, and I hope he will forgive me if I take a little time over this.
It seems to me that a man should be given every opportunity. There is precious little difference nowadays between murder and grievous bodily harm. A man who causes another grievous bodily harm with intent and death results is, in law, guilty of murder. Murder statistics in modern times become nonsensical. The prison doctor at Brixton told me the other day, "Figures do not mean a thing. With the introduction of penicillin the number of people who have been victims of grievous bodily harm with intent and who have been saved from death is enormous."
Judges are allowed to try and to consider the most terrible cases of grievous bodily harm. In some cases another quarter of an inch of a knife would have entailed murder, while others have been saved by a modern drug like penicillin. It is that which is to make all the difference as to whether or not the judge should be allowed to consider what sentence he is to pass. The House has decided on that in a matter of moments. But the more we discuss the word "life" and what it is to mean in this context the better. Tomorrow, the British public will want to know what is meant by "life", exactly what it entails and precisely what the procedure is to be.
After all, to people who can go out and commit murder and indulge in crimes of violence the word does not mean a thing. Until this wretched Bill found its way to the House the matter was in a wonderful state, because such persons did not understand the Homicide Act. One of their first questions on arrest was, "I have killed this man. Is it capital or not?" They never quite knew, and that meant that the deterrent was always still there. The hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) has done a grave disservice to the country by removing it. He will forgive me for feeling strongly about it, for I know he feels strongly too. But perhaps he does not deal as much with the criminal classes these days as I do.
The Home Secretary said—and he will correct me if I am wrong—that nobody will be released without the greatest care and scrutiny as to whether or not it is safe to the public to do so. One wants to know precisely what that care and scrutiny will be, what it will entail and who is to be responsible for advising the Home Secretary. Clearly, if a man has committed murder, the Home Secretary has to be extremely careful, once the Bill is passed, because if the man commits another there will be no question of his being hanged for that second murder.
Thus, the responsibility placed on the shoulders of the Home Secretary is enormous. I would say that it is almost too great because he dare not take a risk of any sort and that will result in the most terrible cruelty and unfairness to many people who might otherwise have been released. But no one can blame the Home Secretary upon whom this responsibility is now being placed for taking a decision on these lines.
Supposing the right hon. and learned Gentleman, having gone into a case most carefully—as I know that he will—decides to release a man after four or five years. Supposing that man, although he has been scrutinised by every doctor concerned, goes beserk again and commits another murder. Just think what effect that will have in the country and in the House. These are the sort of considerations which will apply to every Home Secretary from either side of the House in future.
Hon. Members who know the Civil Service and Government Departments should know that very well. [Interruption.] There is no need for the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne to be offensive. If he wants to interrupt, he should have the courage to get up and do so. He may not like what I am saying, but he may find my arguments a little difficult to answer. The fact is—and he knows it as well as I do—that, although he may not wish it, in the end the Bill will be inhuman and inhumane, because it will mean that for the sake of safety many prisoners who would be otherwise let out after having committed murder literally on the spur of the moment without thinking will always be regarded as a potential danger. No deterrent is to be left, because there is to be no hanging for second murder. A sensible Department like the Home Office and any Home Secretary will say, "We dare not take a risk and we must keep him inside."
I do not know how many hon. Members had the opportunity to visit prisons. There is nothing more ghastly or depressing than for a man who has committed murder or caused grievous bodily harm when he has lost his temper, perhaps when he was drunk and his girl friend had annoyed him, to spend year after year in these terrible, ghastly, lowering conditions, and yet the unfortunate Home Secretary will not dare to let him out.

It is one of the cruellest things which could be imposed on any man, particularly for a crime like murder which is often committed on the spur of the moment. It is my experience that very few men who get up in the morning to shave know that they will commit murder that evening, and yet year after year such men will have to remain in Brixton, or one of the other prisons.

As we are asked to include this word "life", we have the right to know what it means and to ask the Home Secretary to tell us in the greatest possible detail what in practice a life sentence is to mean to a prisoner sentenced for murder. What assistance is he to have from his legal advisers and the court? Will they be allowed to plead in mitigation for him in open court? When is the sentence first to be reviewed by the Home Secretary himself? Who is to advise the Home Secretary on whether a man is safe to be let out having been given a life sentence, a sentence which at the moment is utterly meaningless?

I am sorry to have detained the House for so long, but I feel strongly about this subject and I am obliged for the attention which I have received.

Question put, That "life" be there inserted in the Bill:—

The House divided: Ayes 207, Noes 86.

Division No. 253.]
AYES
[9.13 p.m.


Abse, Leo
Carmichael, Neil
Foley, Maurice


Albu, Austen
Chapman, Donald
Foot, Sir Dingle (Ipswich)


Alison, Michael (Barkston Ash)
Chataway, Christopher
Foot, Michael (Ebbw Vale)


Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)
Coleman, Donald
Ford, Ben


Alldritt, Walter
Conlan, Bernard
Fraser, Rt. Hn. Tom (Hamilton)


Allen, Schofield (Crewe)
Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)
Ginsburg, David


Atkinson, Norman
Crossman, Rt. Hn. R. H. S.
Gregory, Arnold


Bacon, Miss Alice
Dalkeith, Earl of
Grey, Charles


Bagier, Gordon A. T.
Dalyell, Tam
Griffiths, Rt. Hn. James (Llanelly)


Beaney, Alan
Davies, G. Elfed (Rhondda, E.)
Griffiths, Will (M'chester, Exchange)


Bell, Ronald
Davies, Ifor (Gower)
Hale, Leslie


Bence, Cyril
Davies, S. O. (Merthyr)
Hamilton, James (Bothwell)


Benn, Rt. Hn. Anthony Wedgwood
de Freitas, Sir Geoffrey
Hamling, William (Woolwich, W.)


Bessell, Peter
Delargy, Hugh
Hannan, William


Binns, John
Dell, Edmund
Harper, Joseph


Bishop, E. S.
Diamond, Rt. Hn. John
Harrison, Walter (Wakefield)


Blackburn, F.
Dodds, Norman
Hart, Mrs. Judith


Blenkinsop, Arthur
Driberg, Tom
Hayman, F. H.


Bowden, Rt. Hn. H. W. (Leics S. W.)
Duffy, Dr. A. E. P.
Hazell, Bert


Bowen, Roderic (Cardigan)
Dunn, James A.
Heffer, Eric S.


Braddock, Mrs. E. M.
Edwards, Rt. Hn. Ness (Caerphilly)
Herbison, Rt. Hn. Margaret


Bray, Dr. Jeremy
English, Michael
Hobden, Dennis (Brighton, K'town)


Brooke, Rt. Hn. Henry
Ennals, David
Holman, Percy


Brown, Rt. Hn. George (Belper)
Ensor, David
Hooson, H. E.


Brown, Hugh D. (Glasgow, Provan)
Evans, Ioan (Birmingham, Yardley)
Hornby, Richard


Brown, R. W. (Shoreditch &amp; Fbury)
Fernyhough, E.
Houghton, Rt. Hn. Douglas


Buchan, Norman (Renfrewshire, W.)
Finch, Harold (Bedwellty)
Howarth, Harry (Wellingborough)


Buchanan-Smith, Alick
Fitch, Alan (Wigan)
Howarth, Robert L. (Bolton, E.)


Carlisle, Mark
Floud, Bernard
Howe, Geoffrey (Bebington)




Howell, Denis (Small Heath)
Monslow, Walter
Slater, Mrs. Harriet (Stoke, N.)


Howie, W.
Morris, Alfred (Wythenshawe)
Slater, Joseph (Sedgefield)


Hoy, James
Murray, Albert
Small, William


Hughes, Cledwyn (Anglesey)
Newens, Stan
Snow, Julian


Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)
Noel-Baker, Francis (Swindon)
Soskice, Rt. Hn. Sir Frank


Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)
Noel-Baker, Rt. Hn. Philip (Derby, S.)
Spriggs, Leslie


Hunter, Adam (Dunfermline)
Norwood, Christopher
Stainton, Keith


Irving, Sydney (Dartford)
Oakes, Gordon
Steel, David (Roxburgh)


Jackson, Colin
Ogden, Eric
Steele, Thomas (Dunbartonshire, W.)


Jenkins, Hugh (Putney)
O'Malley, Brian
Stones, William


Jenkins, Rt. Hn. Roy (Stechford)
Oram, Albert E. (E. Ham, S.)
Swain, Thomas


Johnson, James (K'ston-on-Hull, W.)
Orbach, Maurice
Swingler, Stephen


Johnston, Russell (Inverness)
Orme, Stanley
Taverne, Dick


Jones, Dan (Burnley)
Oswald, Thomas
Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)


Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)
Page, Derek (King's Lynn)
Thornton, Ernest


Kenyon, Clifford
Paget, R. T.
Thorpe, Jeremy


Kerr, Mrs. Anne (R'ter &amp; Chatham)
Parker, John
Tinn, James


Lawson, George
Parkin, B. T.
Tuck, Raphael


Lewis, Arthur (West Ham, N.)
Pavitt, Laurence
Urwin, T. W.


Loughlin, Charles
Pearson, Arthur (Pontypridd)
Varley, Eric G.


Lubbock, Eric
Pentland, Norman
Walden, Brian (All Saints)


McBride, Neil
Perry, Ernest G.
Walker, Harold (Doncaster)


McCann, J.
Probert, Arthur
Wallace, George


MacColl, James
Randall, Harry
Watkins, Tudor


MacDermot, Niall
Rees, Merlyn
Wells, William (Walsall, N.)


Mclnnes, James
Reynolds, G. W.
White, Mrs. Eirene


Mackie, George Y. (C'ness &amp; S'land)
Rhodes, Geoffrey
Whitlock, William


Mackie, John (Enfield, E.)
Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)
Wilkins, W. A.


Mahon, Peter (Preston, S.)
Robinson, Rt. Hn. K. (St. Pancras. N.)
Willey, Rt. Hn. Frederick


Mahon, Simon (Bootle)
Rodgers, William (Stockton)
Williams, Alan (Swansea, W.)


Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfield, E.)
Rogers, George (Kensington, N.)
Williams, Clifford (Abertillery)


Manuel, Archie
Rose, Paul B.
Williams, Mrs. Shirley (Hitchin)


Mason, Roy
St. John-Stevas, Norman
Willis, George (Edinburgh, E.)


Mathew, Robert
Shore, Peter (Stepney)
Wilson, William (Coventry, S.)


Maxwell, Robert
Short, Rt. Hn. E. (N'c'tle-on-Tyne, C.)
Winterbottom, R. E.


Mendelson, J. J.
Short, Mrs. Renée (W'hampton, N. E.)
Woodburn, Rt. Hn. A.


Meyer, Sir Anthony
Silkin, John (Deptford)
Woodhouse, Hn. Christopher


Mikardo, Ian
Silkin, S. C. (Camberwell, Dulwich)
Zilliacus, K.


Millan, Bruce
Silverman, Julius (Aston)



Milne, Edward (Blyth)
Silverman, Sydney (Nelson)
TELLERS FOR THE AYES:


Molloy, William
Skeffington, Arthur
Mr. Crawshaw and Dr, Miller.




NOES


Allan, Robert (Paddington, S.)
Gilmour, Sir John (East Fife)
Osborne, Sir Cyril (Louth)


Anstruther-Gray, Rt. Hn. Sir W.
Glyn, Sir Richard
Page, John (Harrow, W.)


Atkins, Humphrey
Goodhew, Victor
Page, R. Graham (Crosby)


Baker, W. H. K.
Grant-Ferris, R.
Percival, Ian


Barlow, Sir John
Grieve, Percy
Pickthorn, Rt. Hn. Sir Kenneth


Box, Donald
Griffiths, Peter (Smethwick)
Pitt, Dame Edith


Boyd-Carpenter, Rt. Hn. J.
Hall-Davis, A. G. F.
Ramsden, Rt. Hn. James


Braine, Bernard
Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N. W.)
Rawlinson, Rt. Hn. Sir Peter


Bromley-Davenport, Lt.-Col. Sir Walter
Harvey, Sir Arthur Vere (Macclesf'd)
Redmayne, Rt. Hn. Sir Martin


Bullus, Sir Eric
Harvie Anderson, Miss
Roots, William


Butcher, Sir Herbert
Hawkins, Paul
Sinclair, Sir George


Clark, William (Nottingham, S.)
Hill, J. E. B. (S. Norfolk)
Stanley, Hn. Richard


Clarke, Brig. Terence (Portsmth, W.)
Hobson, Rt. Hn. Sir John
Stodart, Anthony


Cole, Norman
Hogg, Rt. Hn. Quintin
Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)


Cooke, Robert
Hordern, Peter
Taylor, Edward M. (G'gow. Cathcart)


Crowder, F. P.
Howard, Hn. G. R. (St. Ives)
Temple, John M.


Cunningham, Sir Knox
Kilfedder, James A.
Thatcher, Mrs. Margaret


Dean, Paul
Kimball, Marcus
Turton, Rt. Hn. R. H.


Deedes, Rt. Hn. W. F.
King, Evelyn (Dorset. S.)
Tweedsmuir, Lady


Digby, Simon Wingfield
Lagden, Godfrey
Wall, Patrick


Dodds-Parker, Douglas
Lewis, Kenneth (Rutland)
Ward, Dame Irene


Drayson, G. B.
McAdden, Sir Stephen
Weatherill, Bernard


Eden, Sir John
MacArthur, Ian
Williams, Sir Rolf Dudley (Exeter)


Elliot, Capt. Walter (Carshalton)
Maydon, Lt.-Cmdr. S. L. C.
Wise, A. R.


Fletcher-Cooke, Sir John (S'pton)
Mills, Peter (Torrington)
Woodnutt, Mark


Galbraith, Hn. T. G. D.
Mitchell, David
Wylie, N. R.


Gammans, Lady
Monro, Hector



Gardner, Edward
Mott-Radclyffe, Sir Charles
TELLERS FOR THE NOES:


Gibson-Watt, David
Murton, Oscar
Sir R. Thompson and Mr. Mawby.


Giles, Rear-Admiral Morgan
Noble, Rt. Hn. Michael

Amendment proposed: In page 1, line 7, after the word "life" last inserted, to insert:
Such a sentence shall be of indefinite duration subject only to the prerogative of mercy"—[Mr. Woodhouse.]

Division No. 254.]
AYES
[9.23 p.m.


Allan, Robert (Paddington, S.)
Gilmour, Sir John (East Fife)
Page, R. Graham (Crosby)


Anstruther-Gray, Rt. Hn. Sir W.
Glyn, Sir Richard
Percival, Ian


Atkins, Humphrey
Goodhew, Victor
Pickthorn, Rt. Hn. Sir Kenneth


Baker, W. H. K.
Grant-Ferris, R.
Pitt, Dame Edith


Barlow, Sir John
Grieve, Percy
Ramsden, Rt. Hn. James


Box, Donald
Griffiths, Peter (Smethwick)
Rawlinson, Rt. Hn. Sir Peter


Boyd-Carpenter, Rt. Hn. J.
Hall-Davis, A. G. F.
Redmayne, Rt. Hn. Sir Martin


Braine, Bernard
Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N. W.)
Roots, William


Bromley-Davenport, Lt.-Col. Sir Walter
Harvey, Sir Arthur Vere (Macclesf'd)
Sinclair, Sir George


Bullus, Sir Eric
Harvie Anderson, Miss
Stanley, Hn. Richard


Butcher, Sir Herbert
Hill, J. E. B. (S. Norfolk)
Stodart, Anthony


Clark, William (Nottingham, S.)
Hobson, Rt. Hn. Sir John
Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)


Clarke, Brig. Terence (Portsmth, W.)
Hogg, Rt. Hn. Quintin
Taylor, Edward M. (G'gow, Cathcart)


Cole, Norman
Howard, Hn. G. R. (St. Ives)
Temple, John M.


Cooke, Robert
Kilfedder, James A.
Thatcher, Mrs. Margaret


Crowder, F. P.
King, Evelyn (Dorset, S.)
Tweedsmuir, Lady


Cunningham, Sir Knox
Lagden, Godfrey
Wall, Patrick


Dean, Paul
Lewis, Kenneth (Rutland)
Ward, Dame Irene


Deedes, Rt. Hn. W. F.
McAdden, Sir Stephen
Weatherill, Bernard


Digby, Simon Wingfield
MacArthur, Ian
Williams, Sir Rolf Dudley (Exeter)


Dodds-Parker, Douglas
May don, Lt.-Cmdr. S. L. C.
Wise, A. R.


Drayson, G. B.
Mills, Peter (Torrington)
Wood, Rt. Hn. Richard


Eden, Sir John
Mitchell, David
Woodhouse, Hn. Christopher


Elliot, Capt. Walter (Carshalton)
Monro, Hector
Woodnutt, Mark


Galbraith, Hn. T. G. D.
Mott-Radclyffe, Sir Charles
Wylie, N. R.


Gammans, Lady
Murton, Oscar



Gardner, Edward
Noble, Rt. Hn. Michael
TELLERS FOR THE AYES:


Gibson-Watt, David
Osborne, Sir Cyril (Louth)
Sir K. Thompson and Mr. Mawby.


Giles, Rear-Admiral Morgan
Page, John (Harrow, W.)





NOES


Abse, Leo
Driberg, Tom
Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)


Albu, Austen
Duffy, Dr. A. E. P.
Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)


Alison, Michael (Barkston Ash)
Dunn, James A.
Hunter, Adam (Dunfermline)


Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)
Edwards, Rt. Hn. Ness (Caerphilly)
Irving, Sydney (Dartford)


Alldrift, Walter
English, Michael
Jackson, Colin


Allen, Scholefield (Crewe)
Ennals, David
Jenkins, Hugh (Putney)


Atkinson, Norman
Ensor, David
Jenkins, Rt. Hn. Roy (Stechford)


Bacon, Miss Alice
Evans, Ioan (Birmingham, Yardley)
Johnson, James (K'ston-on-Hull, W.)


Bagier, Gordon A. T.
Fernyhough, E.
Jones, Dan (Burnley)


Beaney, Alan
Finch, Harold (Bedwellty)
Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)


Bell, Ronald
Fitch, Alan (Wigan)
Kenyon, Clifford


Bence, Cyril
Floud, Bernard
Kerr, Mrs. Anne (R'ter &amp; Chatham)


Benn, Rt. Hn. Anthony Wedgwood
Foley, Maurice
Lawson, George


Binns, John
Foot, Sir Dingle (Ipswich)
Lewis, Arthur (West Ham. N.)


Bishop, E. S.
Foot, Michael (Ebbw Vale)
Loughlin, Charles


Blenkinsop, Arthur
Ford, Ben
Lubbock, Eric


Bowden, Rt. Hn. H. W. (Leics S. W.)
Fraser, Rt. Hn. Tom (Hamilton)
McBride, Neil


Bowen, Roderic (Cardigan)
Ginsburg, David
McCann, J.


Braddock, Mrs. E. M.
Gregory, Arnold
MacColl, James


Bray, Dr. Jeremy
Grey, Charles
MacDermot, Niall


Brooke, Rt. Hn. Henry
Griffiths, Rt. Hn. James (Llanelly)
Mclnnes, James


Brown, Rt. Hn. George (Belper)
Griffiths, Will (M'chester, Exchange)
Mackie, George Y. (C'ness &amp; S'land)


Brown, Hugh D. (Glasgow, Provan)
Hale, Leslie
Mackie, John (Enfield, E.)


Brown, R. W. (Shoreditch &amp; Fbury)
Hamilton, James (Bothwell)
Mahon, Peter (Preston, S.)


Buchan, Norman (Renfrewshire, W.)
Harming, William (Woolwich, W.)
Mahon, Simon (Bootle)


Buchanan-Smith, Alick
Hannan, William
Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfield, E.)


Carlisle, Mark
Harper, Joseph
Manuel, Archie


Carmichael, Neil
Harrison, Walter (Wakefield)
Mason, Roy


Chapman, Donald
Hart, Mrs. Judith
Maude, Angus


Coleman, Donald
Hazell, Bert
Maxwell, Robert


Conlan, Bernard
Heffer, Eric S.
Mendelson, J. J.


Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)
Herbison, Rt. Hn. Margaret
Mikardo, Ian


Crossman, Rt. Hn. R. H. S.
Hobden, Dennis (Brighton, K'town)
Millan, Bruce


Dalyell, Tam
Holman, Percy
Milne, Edward (Blyth)


Davies, G. Elfed (Rhondda, E.)
Hooson, H. E.
Molloy, William


Davies, Ifor (Gower)
Houghton, Rt. Hn. Douglas
Monslow, Walter


Davies, S. O. (Merthyr)
Howarth, Harry (Wellingborough)
Morris, Alfred (Wythenshawe)


de Freitas, Sir Geoffrey
Howe, Geoffrey (Bebington)
Murray, Albert


Delargy, Hush
Howell, Denis (Small Heath)
Newens, Stan


Dell, Edmund
Howie, W.
Noel-Baker, Francis (Swindon)


Diamond, Rt. Hn. John
Hoy, James
Noel-Baker, Rt. Hn Philip (Derby, S.)


Dodds, Norman
Hughes, Cledwyn (Anglesey)
Norwood, Christopher

Question put, That those words there inserted in the Bill:—

The House divided: Ayes Noes 196.

Oakes, Gordon
Rose, Paul B.
Thorpe, Jeremy


Ogden, Eric
St. John-Stevas, Norman
Tinn, James


O'Malley, Brian
Shore, Peter (Stepney)
Tuck, Raphael


Oram, Albert E. (E. Ham, S.)
Short, Rt. Hn. E. (N'c'tle-on-Tyne, C.)
Urwin, T. W.


Orbach, Maurice
Short, Mrs. Renée (W'hampton, N. E.)
Varley, Eric G.


Orme, Stanley
Silkin, John (Deptford)
Walden, Brian (All Saints)


Oswald, Thomas
Silkin, S. C. (Camberwell, Dulwich)
Walker, Harold (Doncaster)


Page, Derek (King's Lynn)
Silverman, Julius (Aston)
Wallace, George


Paget, R. T.
Silverman, Sydney (Nelson)
Watkins, Tudor


Parker, John
Skeffington, Arthur
Wells, William (Walsall, N.)


Parkin, B. T.
Slater, Mrs. Harriet (Stoke, N.)
White, Mrs. Eirene


Pavitt, Laurence
Slater, Joseph (Sedgefield)
Whitlock, William


Pearson, Arthur (Pontypridd)
Small, William
Wilkins, W. A.


Pentland, Norman
Snow, Julian
Willey, Rt. Hn. Frederick


Perry, Ernest C.
Soskice, Rt. Hn. Sir Frank
Williams, Alan (Swansea, W.)


Probert, Arthur
Spriggs, Leslie
Williams, Clifford (Abertillery)


Randall, Harry
Steel, David (Roxburgh)
Williams, Mrs. Shirley (Hitchin)


Rees, Merlyn
Steele, Thomas (Dunbartonshire, W.)
Willis, George (Edinburgh, E.)


Reynolds, G. W.
Stones, William
Wilson, William (Coventry, S.)


Rhodes, Geoffrey
Swain, Thomas
Winterbottom, R. E.


Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)
Swingier, Stephen
Woodburn, Rt. Hn. A.


Robinson, Rt. Hn. K. (St. Pancras, N.)
Taverne, Dick
Zilliacus, K.


Rodgers, William (Stockton)
Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)



Rogers, George (Kensington, N.)
Thornton, Ernest
TELLERS FOR THE NOES:




Mr. Crawshaw and Dr. Miller.

9.33 p.m.

Mr. Sydney Silverman: I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
I do not propose to detain the House for more than a few minutes because, although the Bill is an important one, I think it will be generally agreed that it has had pretty thorough discussion and examination by the House. I would think that in my time in this House no Bill has received more careful or more detailed—or, I might add, more repeated—scrutiny in every principle and in every detail than this Measure has had in the seven months that have elapsed since the House gave it a Second Reading by more than a two to one majority. In those circumstances, it is not necessary to say a very great deal at this stage, but in view of the importance of the Measure and of the time and attention that the House has given to it, it would be inappropriate were we to part with it without any exordium at all.
I have called the Bill an important Bill. In the course of our debates people have said that it raises great constitutional issues. This I do not believe. I do not believe that a mere Amendment of the penal code, though it might be important, can ever raise a great constitutional issue. But in so far as the abolition of the death penalty from our law could be supposed to raise a constitutional issue of any kind it was raised in 1957 by the Homicide Act, which Parliament then accepted without much opposition and which really made the change in principle that this Bill does no more than complete.
There is perhaps one aspect of the Bill that might raise a constitutional principle, and one for which the original sponsors of the Bill were not responsible. It was thought in Committee that even hon. Members who were utterly convinced that the death penalty had ceased to serve any useful purpose in a civilised community still had fears that perhaps they might be mistaken, so the right hon. Member for Hampstead (Mr. Brooke), who himself voted for the Second Reading and who I feel sure will vote for the Third Reading tonight, proposed a Clause in order to make sure—this is reported; although I did not hear his speech I read it—that the House of Commons should have an opportunity, and not merely the House of Commons but Parliament, of reconsidering the matter at the end of five years. If Parliament at that time thought it was right it would repeal the law that we are now engaged in discussing and re-enact the law that we are now proposing to abolish, and it should be able to do so quickly and easily by a simple Resolution of both Houses of Parliament.
Although I did not share the anxieties or the fears and although I would have preferred to have had an end to this argument which has been going on now in this country for 150 years, nevertheless I saw and do see this point and I have not sought to interfere with the Clause at any subsequent stage. It is now in the Bill and it remains, but I hope the right hon. Member will not mind my saying that he chose what I think a very odd and eccentric way of


doing it which is of very dubious constitutionality because under the Clause now in the Bill—and I have not sought to change it—if it happened in five years' time that a Government did want to repeal what we are now doing and to re-enact what we are abolishing they would not need to come to the House of Commons or to the House of Lords at all. All that they would have to do would be to sit back and do nothing and not permit anyone else by not providng time to do anything either.
This seems a very strange doctrine. I may be asked why, then, I did not try to interfere with it? I am assured by those who know much more about the ways of Governments than I suppose I shall ever know that we ought to enact this power by Statute to repeal a law and enact another law without the voice of Parliament at all because it is inconceivable that any Government should use the power which we are thus giving to them. It seems to me a rather odd, as I said before and as I repeat, and a rather eccentric reason for giving a Government a power that it is inconceivable that they would ever use it. However, the right hon. Gentleman has been a member of a Government. I never have. He has been a member of a Government for a long time, and I must be content with his assurance. Therefore, I have not interfered. In any case, the Clause does not interfere with the principle of the Bill. It has nothing to do with keeping the death penalty. It has nothing to do with abolishing the death penalty. It has nothing to do with what sentences are substituted or not substituted. It has nothing to do with what is to be done with prisoners. So it is not a matter with which I, as the sponsor of the Bill, am concerned.
We have a second Chamber. Some wish we had not. Some are glad we have. Everybody, knowing that we have one, recognises that the second Chamber can, if it wishes, perform a useful purpose by revising what we do. It may very well be—I do not know—that this Clause will afford the second Chamber a suitable subject on which to exercise its powers of revision.
I have every respect for the band of Members of the House—I am glad to say a diminishing band, as is shown by the figures in the Divisions today—who have

fought so very hard to prevent the change that we are now enacting. They have done it with courage. They have done it with determination. They have done it with industry. They have neglected no opportunity to make their voices heard and to have their way. They have often done it with eloquence. They have always done it with persistence. I have every respect for them for having done so.
But, in effect, what have they been doing? They have been fighting a gallant losing rearguard action against the 150 years' protest that our history has shown in favour of civilising our penal system. If they had their way, we would be back to the old days described by one of the characters in Shaw's "Caesar and Cleopatra".
And so till the end of history murder shall breed murder
Always in the name of right and peace
Until the gods get tired of blood and create a race that can understand.
We have been trying to learn, trying to create that race for the past 150 years. One hundred and fifty years ago there were between 200 and 300 crimes in this country, some of them very trivial crimes, which were capital crimes. A child of nine was hanged in public for stealing a paint box worth 2d. People were hanged for damaging Westminster Bridge, for cutting down trees on Sundays, for associating with gypsies. I wonder where my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Crayford (Mr. Dodds) is, who is the spokesman for gypsies in this House.
This is what we did. Sir Samuel Romilly fought ineffectively year after year after year and never gave up. The fight that he fought in that minority was, in my opinion, a nobler and a more civilised fight than that which has been put up against the Bill during the last few months.

Mr. Victor Goodhew: rose—

Mr. Silverman: I do not want to keep the House long. I am only expressing a point of view. Fifty years after that, 100 years ago, 200 or 300 capital crimes which disgraced our country have been reduced to four. In the 100 years since then, this country has never executed anybody in peacetime except for murder. This was good, real progress—maybe by our standards rapid progress—but


slower progress than that made in most other parts of Europe where the death penalty for this kind of crime was abolished in some cases 70, 80 and 100 years ago, and in other cases 30 or 40 years ago. We were slow, but we were gradually catching up. In 1957 we had caught up five-sixths of the way. Since 1957 I suppose the average number of people convicted of capital crimes in this country have been two or three a year. All the excitement, fuss and bother, all the late night sittings, the Committee stages—one upstairs and one downstairs—all the prolonged discussions and repeated arguments—what have they been for? They have been in order that we should go on executing two people a year.
The argument was that we were making a very great and dangerous change if we stopped doing it. I am glad to see that the House of Commons, when it has been left to itself, has never held that opinion. In all the years that I have been here the House of Commons has always voted against the death penalty when it was left to itself and not guided by party Whips in any way.

Mr. Goodhew: rose—

Hon. Members: Sit down.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Dr. Horace King): If the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) does not give way, the hon. Member for St. Albans (Mr. Goodhew) must resume his seat.

Brigadier Terence Clarke: Of course, the hon. Member's Whips are on.

Mr. Silverman: I know of only one occasion when any party or any Government invited the House to deal with this matter with the party Whips on. That was on the Homicide Act, 1957 and it is because the House, under the Whips' guidance, in those days made such a mess of it that we are having to improve it now. On every other occasion, in 1936, 1955 and 1956 the Whips were off. On all the other occasions neither party had any official Whips on. It is true that the sponsors and supporters of this Bill have tried to organise their forces and we have

had our own unofficial whips. Of course, we have. This is perfectly proper.
This is perfectly legitimate. No one is complaining of it. The point I am making is not about groups of people organising their own forces by unofficial whips, if one likes to call them that. I am talking about the interference of parties for party purposes in such a way as to prevent Members of Parliament from exercising their honest, independent consciences and judgment on this question. I am proud to think that a British House of Commons during all the time I have been in it, whenever it has had that opportunity without being directed, without any question of party loyalties or anything of that kind, has always come down against the death penalty. Now what we are proposing to do is to get rid of the last remnant of it and I rejoice that I have had some little share in doing it. The thing which we are doing and which we hope to complete is to rid at last this green and pleasant land of the shadow of the gallows.

9.52 p.m.

Sir J. Hobson: The hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) said almost nothing at all about the Bill. He said a great deal about the eighteenth century, about the nineteenth century, about 1957, and about Whipping, but what about the Bill? He is right in saying that what we are discussing are two executions a year, but we are discussing whether those two executions a year do or do not provide a proper protection for society and law and order. I would ask the House to vote against this Third Reading and to say that this is a Bill which the country as a whole does not want and one which could not have been produced at a more inappropriate time, at a time when violence and crime are increasing daily to the horror of every decent citizen.
It is being introduced at such a time when its effect is to remove one of the principal deterrents and one of the most potent barriers against the dangerous criminals under whom we have to suffer today. One could not imagine a more inappropriate week in which we should have the Third Reading of the Bill, a week in which Wandsworth Prison was sprung by a dangerous gang and some of the most dangerous criminals were released, and a week in which there


was another bank robbery—[Interruption.]

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Order. I remind the House that this is a very serious debate. I hope that hon. Members will behave in a way worthy of the occasion.

Mr. George Y. Mackie: The right hon. and learned Member for Warwick and Leamington (Sir J. Hobson) has mentioned Wands-worth Prison. Would he therefore have hanged the train robbers instead of committing them to prison?

Sir J. Hobson: That is a futile question. They never committed murder, and we are discussing penalties for murder. [HON. MEMBERS: "Why bring them in?"] I am saying that this Bill by its consequences removes a most potent protection, first of all for police officers, secondly for prison warders, thirdly for those who are responsible for effecting lawful arrest, and fourthly for those responsible for preventing rescues from lawful prisons. We are considering the question of the use of guns for the purpose of effecting dangerous crimes or, if necessary, releasing prisoners from prison. We are considering the way in which the criminal classes in this country behave and have not, up to now, carried arms. This is one of the few countries in which, by and large, neither the police officer nor the criminal is armed. Yet it is proposed to remove what I regard as one of the vital protections which have perpetuated this situation.
I have always made clear that I thought that the principle of the 1957 Act was right. I was not in the House at the time, but I have never spoken against it and I consider that the House was right to remove the supreme penalty except for those murders for which its retention was maintained by the 1957 Act. But the fact that the 1957 Act may have been right affords no argument for saying that its principle should be extended to every possible case. I have always thought that the exceptions preserved by the 1957 Act, which are now to be abolished by the Bill were right and correct exceptions. I cannot follow the argument that, because in many cases it may be right not to have the death penalty, it is right in all cases not to have it. This is simply an argument for uniformity and does not

begin to approach the question whether the presence of the death penalty in certain cases does or does not preserve the life of those who are particularly at risk and does or does not preserve law and order by the unhappy circumstance that two people a year have to be executed.
The 1957 Act was essentially designed to protect those who had to undertake particularly dangerous service on behalf of the community, police officers, prison warders, those who have to arrest criminals and those who have to keep prisoners in safe custody and prevent their being set at large again. I think it vital, and I am sure that most of the rest of the country thinks it vital, that these protections should be preserved for the public servants upon whom we rely.
Some hon. Members may have noted the statement issued by Scotland Yard after the events at Wandsworth Prison last Friday afternoon. It said:
As these men may be armed, members of the public who may encounter them are advised to contact the police at once, without approaching them".
The implication of that is that we can sleep sound and warm in our beds while we expect some police officers, on our behalf, to approach and apprehend these men who are thought to be armed and likely to shoot. It is at this stage that the promoter of the Bill and the Home Secretary propose to remove the protections which the law has until now provided.
Can anyone pretend that the presence of the death penalty in such circumstances has no effect whatever upon the conduct of either the fugitive or the pursuer? Anyone who has ever used a firearm or who has been at the receiving end of powder and shot, in peace or war, knows what an impact the thought of capital punishment can have upon those who are minded to carry arms. One has only to state the equation to see what a difference there is.

Mr. Brian Walden: rose—

Sir J. Hobson: No; there is little time. On one side, the equation may be stated in this way. The criminal puts it to himself as, "The chance of my liberty or a policeman's life". That is the situation when there is no capital punishment.


If there is capital punishment, the criminal's equation is, "The chance of my liberty against a policeman's life or the chance of my life". The difference between those two situations is immense for those who have to enforce the law, for those who have to keep dangerous prisoners in custody and for those who are expected to tackle armed men on behalf of the community. I deeply regret that we are at this stage removing this protection which we have always given.
I realise that many hon. Members are haunted by the picture of the gallows. I have always made plain that I detest the idea of judicial capital punishment, but I am also convinced that murder is a filthy crime, and I am haunted by some of those who have suffered at the hands of murderers.
Above all, since the introduction of the Bill, I am haunted by the history of two ordinary bodies of the Cumberland Police Force, one of whom is now dead, leaving a widow and children, and the other of whom is paralysed for life with a bullet in his spine, all because a petty thief, after this Bill was introduced, took out a gun and decided to use it. No one can tell what impact the introduction of the Bill had on that man.

It being Ten o'clock, the debate stood adjourned.
Ordered, That the Proceedings on the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Bill may be entered upon and proceeded with at this day's Sitting at any hour, though opposed.—[Mr. Edward Short.]

Question again proposed, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

Sir J. Hobson: The question comes back in every case to whether petty thieves and other criminals will in future be more minded to take out their guns and use them than they have been in the past. It comes back, as my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford (Mr. Woodhouse) said, to whether one believes that the existence of the capital sentence is or is not a deterrent. That is the whole nub of the Bill, and it is the topic that the mover of the Bill and the mover of the Third Reading never mentioned once in the whole course of his speech. Does one believe that the

existence of the death penalty for these particular types of crimes is or is not a deterrent?
As I have always said in these debates, it must be largely a matter of judgment and estimation, and I think it is also a matter of common sense and of common experience. Certainly the vast majority of people in the country think that it is a deterrent. Certainly those most concerned, the police forces and prison officers, think it is a deterrent. Certainly I, with a little experience of crime, am convinced in my own mind that it is a deterrent and that these types of murders will increase in future and that, while two people a year may not hang, more people will suffer death than might have been the situation if the Bill was not passed.
The figures support that view, although they are not conclusive. In my absence, the hon. Gentleman for Nelson and Colne in Committee, without notice, delivered an attack upon figures I had included in a letter to The Times. I think it will turn out that my figures were quite accurate and that his attack was wholly unjustified. He did not withdraw it, but never mind about that.
Let us look at the latest figures published in Written Answers to Questions on 17th June of this year. The Home Secretary gave figures of what has been happening since the 1957 Act was passed. The first part of the table shows that since the 1957 Homicide Act, the number of murders per million of the population has steadily increased over the whole period. It has never declined, and it is now at the highest level at which it has ever been. The rate is 26 per cent. higher than in the years before 1957. When one looks at the table which divides up those murders which were capital and always have been capital and those which became non-capital after 1957, one finds that in the three-year period immediately before 1957 and in the immediately preceding three years before today, there has been a very substantial increase in the non-capital murders and that the number of capital murders is almost exactly the same.
For the three years before 1957, there were 67 capital murders, and in the last three years there were 69. That is an increase of 3 per cent., and, substantially, it is the same. For non-capital murders


in the three years before 1957 there were 361 such murders. In the last three years there were 488, which is an increase of 35 per cent. over the position that existed before the 1957 Act was passed. If one looks at the figures of non-capital murders where the deterrent has been abolished, one finds that in every single year since 1957 they were higher than they were in any year before 1957, that they were steadily rising over the whole period and that in the last two years they were higher than they have ever been.

Mr. Paget: I have just been checking the facts of the Cumberland case which the right hon. and learned Gentleman mentioned. Is he aware that the murderer immediately attempted to commit suicide and was found to be insane and unfit to plead?

Sir J. Hobson: I am perfectly well aware that he was found to be unfit to plead because he was shot by the police.

Mr. Paget: He shot himself.

Sir J. Hobson: He may have shot himself but the police also shot him. That event was one of the most horrifying that has ever happened. I personally think—it must be a matter of judgment and estimation—that, whatever one says about that case, there may well be more cases in future when thieves go out with guns and, when startled, will be minded to use them. Whether as a result of using them they decide subsequently to take their own life must be a matter of estimation, too.
I do not want to detain the House further because so many of my hon. Friends want to speak. I merely say that I regard the promoter of the Bill as a misguided crusader who is suffering from some self-induced myopia. The principle may have been good in 1957, but the fact that it was a good principle in 1957 for the majority of cases does not mean that that principle must be applied in every case. The exception sometimes does prove the rule and, in my view, the extension of the principle of 1957 to every case is a mistake, and I hope that the House will reject the Bill.

10.7 p.m.

Mr. Douglas Dodds-Parker: I shall detain the House only a short while. I want to explain to the

House, and to my constituents, too, the standpoint I take, why on Second Reading I abstained and why on Third Reading I am proposing to vote against the Bill. It is usually the reverse that one finds in this House.
When I saw the Bill for the first time I thought it was a bad Bill, for reasons which I shall come to. To start off with, I should like to indicate the background from which I personally speak. In a previous incarnation many years ago, in the course of my duties I had to preside over courts trying homicide cases, and though the circumstances were very different from those in this country, the principles on which that work was founded were the same as one finds here.
I would say in passing that I regret the increase in publicity for murderers in the last few years, the glamorisation of murder, and the way in which death, whether it is in war or through murder, is made out to be clean and painless. If only the people as a whole could see what a terrible thing it is, whether in war or murder, as many of us have seen, I think they would be very much more against it.
The second point that I want to make about the background from which I speak is that I have for 20 years now listened to the voice of the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) and listened to the great advocacy which he has brought, in my opinion, in a somewhat misguided way from time to time, to this issue. It was, however, during the five years recently when I was not in this House that I came to the conclusion, particularly after having done a certain amount of work concerned with mental illness, that all who deliberately take life should be regarded in broad terms as mentally ill.
So in principle I came to the conclusion that the time had perhaps been reached for abolition, subject to certain provisos. Though, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Sir J. Hobson) has said, very few individuals have been hanged in the last few years, I still think this is a question of first principle. The three provisos, which have already been argued so much in full during the course of the Committee and Report stages, and which were put so admirably by my right hon. and hon. Friends, have not, unfortunately,


been accepted by the sponsors of the Bill, who have not, in my opinion, done what is required to protect society from murderers.
All the arguments have been gone over time and again, and I do not propose to repeat them. But I support in the strongest possible terms what my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington said about the police force. I find it strange that the Home Secretary, in the course of his remarks—and I have tried to follow this Bill through Committee—seems to have taken no line for the police force for which he is administratively, in general terms, responsible.
I remember that when the issue of flogging came before the House some years ago it decided to abolish flogging except in the case of attacks on prison officers. I think that it was then generally accepted that had this not been done, we should not have been able to maintain a proper prison service.
I also underline what my right hon. and learned Friend said about the recent jail breaks and the attempts to break out using armed men from outside. Perhaps I may again quote from my personal experience. About 30 years ago, I was required to clear up a disturbed part of the world and managed to collect 5,000 firearms under circumstances of civilian disturbance and, fortunately, only two lives were lost. I would not have been prepared to do it had the police under my command felt that, if they were shot during their duties, the individuals responsible would be punished only in the very vague terms set forth in this Bill.
The second proviso, which has also been argued in full, concerns the question of an alternative sentence. The term "life" is obviously unsatisfactory as defined today. I shall not go over the ground again, for it has been covered so much in the past few months, but I am certain that the review body should consist primarily of judges with doctors and others with lay experience; and that the decisions should not be left to politicians, however distinguished they may be and however full of and charged with mercy.
There have also been certain contradictions in the arguments of hon. Members

supporting abolition. They maintain that human life is sacred and that therefore the community must not take life, as it were, in revenge. At the same time, they seem to argue that those who have taken life should not themselves be deprived of any very substantial period of their life, but should be let out and a risk taken in the circumstances which have been described from this side of the House earlier this evening.
This puts a tremendous burden on the Home Secretary of the day, and I think that he will be found more unwilling than in the past to take a risk by letting out some individual convicted of capital murder. I am not as closely in touch with the criminal classes as some hon. Members on both sides of the House, but I understand that the 30-year sentences for the train robbers have shaken the criminal classes—and certainly for treason I feel that few terms of imprisonment could be too long.
But if one accepts that those who kill are mentally ill, as I tend to believe, I also feel that those convicted of capital murder as it stands under the 1957 Act should be kept in more or less permanent detention. If I may finally quote from my own experience, I remember the case of an individual sentenced to life imprisonment. He came out after ten years and it was thought that everything would be all right. However, he was soon back for he did the same thing again. He himself said, "I can never come out again. I cannot be trusted. I cannot ask anyone to trust me outside again."
The third point, which occurred to me when I first saw the Bill, was that it should be subject to review after five years. Now, on the initiative of my right hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead (Mr. Brooke), to whom I am grateful, that provision has been inserted in the Bill.
What disturbs me is that there appears to be no acceptance by the sponsors of the Bill of points raised in genuine good faith from this side of the House. In the last twenty years I have noticed that, with notable exceptions, many of the abolitionists are not prepared to give the same credit for sincerity to the retentionists as we give to those who stand for abolition. Therefore, while I accept the very general principle that the day


has probably come for abolition, in view of the rigidity of the sponsors of the Bill, I shall go into the Lobby against it tonight.

10.16 p.m.

Sir Richard Glyn: I am one of those who have a sincere fear that if the Bill becomes law in its present form it will invite a development which hitherto this country has been spared. It will create what I can describe only as a Chicago situation. Hitherto—and here I disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Mr. Dodds-Parker)—it may sometimes have been true that people who killed have generally been mentally ill—although not always, because in our criminal experience we have had one or two people who have systematically killed for gain, and Haigh, of course, was one.
Anybody who successfully sets out on a career of killing for gain is altogether more dangerous and altogether more antisocial than the mentally ill killers. Hitherto, these killers for gain have been fortunately quite exceptional and, as long as there was a real deterrent, the professional criminal has practically never carried a firearm or other dangerous weapon with the intention of shooting his way out if arrested. We now have two quite new developments. First, we are now on the Third Reading of the Bill, and it may well become law. If it does, the only effective deterrent will cease to exist for professional criminals.
There is a distinct difference of opinion on both sides of the House between those of us whose duty it has been in the past to defend or prosecute and occasionally to try professional criminals and those who have not done so. My own opinion was strongly affected years before the war when at Middlesex Sessions just over the way I defended an Irishman charged with a quite minor offence. As his defending counsel it was my duty to ascertain his previous convictions. He had a list of minor previous convictions in this country, but in his own country of Southern Ireland he had two convictions for shooting policemen, although not killing them, and one for shooting and wounding a member of the militia. He said quite frankly that in those days in Southern Ireland it paid to shoot and in this country it did not.

I am afraid that if the Bill becomes law it will pay to shoot in this country and the professional classes will begin to shoot their way out regardless.
This fear is greatly augmented by what happened last week. The Home Secretary says—and we accept that he speaks with perfect sincerity—that he willl not release a convicted murderer as long as that man is a danger, but we have now reached a stage when he is not the only person with power to release from prison and when there is no prison in this country which can hold a dangerous man securely if his equally dangerous confederates are resolved to get him out. It is not only that they have succeeded repeatedly; it is that up to the present they have never failed. In these circumstances, to allow the Bill to become law when the country has no secure prison in which a really dangerous man can be kept longer than his associates decide is an act of irresponsibility, and I believe that those who are associated with it are failing in their duty to their fellow citizens.
A great deal has been said about hanging being barbaric. Perhaps it is. Those of us who saw a little of sudden death in the last war—and hon. Members on both sides of the House saw it—know that death by shooting is neither kind nor unbarbaric. It may be instantaneous, and so may hanging, but it can be a long drawn out and barbaric business. If the Bill becomes law we shall be giving a professional criminal the right to shoot his way, first, out of any attempt to apprehend him and, secondly—if he can get the weapon—out of prison. He has nothing at all to lose, because if he is in prison his mates shoot their way in and shoot his way out, and if they are apprehended in doing that they will merely be put into prison, and then someone else gets them out. To the professional criminal with a sufficient number of professional associates the Bill takes all the deterrent out of murder, from first to last.
In my view, the Bill could create a Chicago situation in this country. We have some successful, desperate criminals—people who have been inhibited from shooting their way out in the past only by the known consequences of doing so. If the Bill becomes law these consequences will be wholly removed. It will


not be forgotten that the daring escape of which we have been talking was achieved in daylight last week with the aid of loaded guns. The warders were prevented from following the escaped prisoners over the wall because they were covered with loaded guns, one of which was left in the pantechnicon which was an essential part of the escape apparatus. When they were away from the prison the gang did not need so many guns.
Does the Home Secretary expect warders to face loaded weapons as part of their duty to restrain prisoners from escaping with the aid of armed accomplices? If so, he is being a little unreasonable. We are glad to know that he is taking steps to create a more secure prison. It is said that this will be ready in, perhaps, three years' time. We have learned to appreciate that these estimates are generally optimistic, but even if this prison is ready in three years' time what will happen in those three years? Why is not this Bill held up until an effective security prison exists? What possible deterrent is it to a member of a resolute and cunning gang to tell him that he will be convicted? First, will he be detected? Very few of these successful robbers are detected, even without the advantage of being able to use firearms.
At a time when the conviction rate for these offences is lower than it has ever been we are going to provide that if these people are convicted they are merely to be sentenced to imprisonment in one of the several prisons from which their accomplices can get them out, I do not say overnight, but after a relatively short time, the length of which may depend more on the willingness of the prisoner to pay than upon anything else. We have had a wholesale escape in daylight with the aid of loaded firearms.
For this House to pass this Bill the very next week is a desperate step and one which puts into jeopardy not only the prison officers and police officers whose duty it will be to apprehend these men, if they can be found, but those members of the public who feel it their duty—and it is their duty—to assist the police in this regard. It is very interesting to notice that only a few weeks ago Scotland Yard invited the public to assist them in apprehending violent criminals and asked

them "to have a go". It is very significant that, last week, after this escape—this rescue, for that is what it was—from prison in London, the police advised the public not to have a go. They said, "These men are armed with loaded firearms and are dangerous. You should not attempt to restrain them."
This is the position to which we are being brought. The word has gone out to the criminals that it is no longer any danger to shoot a civilian, an honest citizen, or a policeman or a prison officer if it happens to be convenient to do so. This will be the effective position throughout the country if this Bill becomes law. We shall have arrived at a Chicago position and the responsibility will lie heavily not only on the shoulders of the sponsors of this Bill—some of them are present, though there was a moment at an important stage in Committee when none was present and the Committee was in some difficulties because of their absence—

Mr. Paget: rose—

Sir Richard Glyn: I will give way in a moment.
I am sorry that the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) is not here. He made a statement in opening this debate which is very much on a par with a number of his other statements in a way which demonstrates to us his arrogance in his conduct of this Bill. He told us that no one had been executed in peace time except for murder for many years. I wonder if he contends that "Lord Haw-Haw" and other traitors were executed for murder. They were executed long after the war had finished—[AN HON. MEMBER: "For crimes in war-time."] War time is war and peace time is peace time. What the hon. Member said was inaccurate on that occasion, as a number of his other statements have been.

Mr. Paget: I wanted to ask the hon. Gentleman, on his claim we were descending to a Chicago position, whether he is aware that in Chicago they have both the death penalty and armed police.

Sir Richard Glyn: That is perfectly true, but they had got to a stage in Chicago where none of the more prominent gangsters was ever even arrested for murder, indeed, not even for any charge at all.
The Chicago situation was one in which honest citizens were so afraid to give evidence or even to take part in a convicting jury that it proved impossible to convict any of these notorious murderers for years. The hon. and learned Gentleman should know, and perhaps does, that the most notorious of the Chicago murderers—Al Capone—who was involved in literally hundreds of murders, was never convicted of murder and was tried only once on that charge and acquitted. He was eventually imprisoned, after many years, not for any offence of violence, but only for not paying income tax—[HON. MEMBERS: "So what?"]

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Order. We are getting a little wide of the Third Reading of the Bill if we discuss in detail the fate of Al Capone.

Sir Richard Glyn: I apologise, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. I was misled, as on several occasions before, by the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr.

Paget). Perhaps I went rather wide in trying to answer his argument.
If the Bill makes sense—I accept the sincerity of those who think that it does—this is no time to introduce it, when it has been clearly demonstrated beyond argument that we have no prison in this country which is capable of holding a ruffian whose accomplices are sufficiently resolute and determined to get him out.
This is not the time to enact a Measure of this kind. As the Bill is drafted, there is no real deterrent in it. The long title talks of making further provision for the punishment of people convicted of murder, but the Bill completely fails to achieve that. I believe that if the Bill becomes law not just one or two convicted murderers who might otherwise have been hanged will remain alive but a greater number of innocent citizens, policemen and prison officers—who will have been innocent of everything except that they got in the way of a resolute criminal armed with a loaded gun—will be killed.

10.30 p.m.

Mr. Emlyn Hooson: I have always been opposed, certainly during my adult years, to the death penalty. I listened with interest to the remarks of the hon. Member for Dorset, North (Sir Richard Glyn), but I believe that he grossly exaggerates what will be the consequences of abolishing the death penalty, although I appreciate that he is genuine in his fears.
I have no wish to repeat the arguments which I adduced on Second Reading, when I analysed some of the speeches which have been made since 1810 expressing, as the speakers then believed, the legitimate fears of those who opposed the abolition of capital punishment, whether for sheep stealing, pickpocketing or anything else. The judges were particularly emphatic about the spate of crimes that would take place if the death penalty was abolished for those crimes.
Although I will not repeat my earlier arguments, I must mention one example; the fact that the death penalty used to be imposed for pickpocketing. When it was originally suggested that hanging for pickpocketing should be abolished, there was a great outcry against the suggestion. It was said that there would be a greater number of pickpockets and that hanging was the only deterrent to that sort of criminal.
Arthur Koestler much later analysed the facts and proved conclusively that hanging for pickpocketing was not a deterrent. Indeed, he found that at the very moment when people's necks were stretched, so to speak, as they watched the spectacle of a public hanging, so then the pickpockets got to work. That was the extent of the deterrent for the crime of pickpocketing. I am not trying to ridicule the hon. Member for Dorset, North, for I accept that he is genuine in his fears of the consequences of the abolition of the death penalty for murder. However, I am convinced that his fears are unfounded.
I defended my first murder case when I was 27 years old. I will not go into the circumstances whereby a very junior counsel defended the man because there were peculiar circumstances. I will always remember the case. He was the last man, under the old dispensation, to be hanged at Walton Prison, although I suppose that that does not say much

for my advocacy. That man has been dead for many years, so perhaps I may be forgiven for repeating some of his words to me. When I first saw him he said, "I did it. I deserve to die. She deserved to die and I want to hang." He added, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth".
I accept that as the only genuine argument in favour of the death penalty. Let us get rid of all the cant and hypocrisy about the deterrent. The only genuine argument in favour of hanging is retribution. I understand the satisfaction of the widow of a man who has been murdered feeling that the man who did the murder has paid the supreme penalty for that crime. I understand—it is a well understood human emotion—that people get satisfaction from the knowledge; say, the widow of a policeman getting some satisfaction from the knowledge that the man who killed her husband has paid the supreme penalty. While this is the only genuine argument in favour of the retention of the death penalty, I suggest that in a civilised community its retention on this ground cannot be tolerated.

Mr. James Dance: The hon. and learned Gentleman talks of this not being a deterrent, but most of our argument against the Bill at the present moment is that no alternative is provided. That is the whole argument. There must be a deterrent against this sort of crime, and we are arguing that hanging is a deterrent, or the death penalty is a deterrent. I ask for a deterrent against these ghastly murders.

Mr. Hooson: I would listen with more sympathy to the hon. Member if he could show by historical analysis that when the death penalty was abolished for, say, sheep stealing, there was more sheep stealing; that when it was abolished for picking pockets there was more pocket picking; that when it was abolished for the two hundred offences for which it was originally imposed more of those offences were committed—

Mr. Dance: There are more crimes of violence going on now than at any time.

Mr. Hooson: There are fewer murders today than there were when we had a very much smaller population.
Since my first case I have appeared in many other cases of murder both for the prosecution and for the defence. My experience may not be that of other hon. and learned Members, but I can only speak from my own experience. I am not convinced that in any case in which I have appeared the sentence made any difference at all—the murder would still have been committed. I may be wrong, but my conviction is based on personal experience.

Mr. David Mitchell: The hon. and learned Member asked whether anyone could give an example of where there had been an increase in crime for which the death penalty had been abolished. I thought that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Sir J. Hobson) had made it clear that comparing the three years before the passing of the 1957 Act with the last three years there had been a 3 per cent. increase in capital murders and an increase of over 30 per cent. in non-capital murders. There is a perfectly concrete example—not sheep stealing, but something going on now.

Mr. Hooson: I will ignore that intervention and take another example. I have a good friend who is a judge in the court of appeal in Finland, where there is no death penalty. After the war, many of their judges, worried about the incidence of murder advocated its return. In Lapland, particularly, after the war, there were many murders because it was very much a Klondyke after the German devastation there. This experience supported those who advocated the return of the death penalty. It was not restored, but I understand that murder in Finland has gone down steadily since about 1955. That is an example of how one can not take statistics out of any one period to prove this issue one way or the other.
As I said on Second Reading, I think that the genuine fears expressed by many hon. Members on this side of the House will prove to be unfounded. If in ten years' time the same arguments can be put forward that we have heard in these debates, I shall be astonished—

Mr. Godfrey Lagden: You won't be here.

Mr. Hooson: The hon. Member tends to forget that the death penalty is not only for those who commit murder. I

have listened with respect to the arguments put forward by the right hon. and learned Member for Warwick and Leamington, but I invite arty hon. Member to read the speeches in favour of the retention of the death penalty from 1810 onwards; except for emphasis, they have not changed much since. We have exactly the same arguments based on a genuine fear, but, in the ultimate, based entirely on misapprehension.
We have a great deal to learn in this country about the relationship between crime and punishment; most crime, I believe, is not calculated at all. I revert to the point made by the hon. Member for Dorset, North about the train robbery. I think that this was an exceptional crime. This was a highly calculated crime, and there was a great deal to be said for the long sentences passed upon the criminals involved because they had made their calculation, and the judge, in his way, made his calculation, too. This escape was made not to rescue a murderer but because those concerned had the money with which to engineer and organise a highly skilled operation of escape. I am sure that that escape cost many thousands of pounds. It has no relevance to the issue of the death penalty.

Sir Richard Glyn: Will the hon. and learned Gentleman bear in mind that the train robbery was committed before this Bill had been brought before the House, and the evidence given at the trial was that the leaders had insisted that no lethal weapon of any kind, let alone a firearm, was to be carried? At the escape, on the other hand, which took place after the Bill was before the House, firearms were used.

Mr. Hooson: I appreciate that point, but it was done because they had hired people to do it. There are people who are willing to be hired for large sums; and this was a calculated crime of an exceptional kind in this country. [An HON. MEMBER: "There will be some more."]
Now that the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) is back in his place, I wish to congratulate him upon the persistence with which he has put forward this reform. I have disagreed with the hon. Gentleman on occasions, and I expect that I shall violently disagree with him on some


occasions in the future, but I believe that his name will go down in the history of this House. Whether hon. Members agree or disagree with him, one cannot but admire the persistence with which he has put forward this very necessary reform in our system, and I am sure that in the future people will be amazed at the resistance there was to this essentially civilising change in our penal system.

10.42 p.m.

Mr. James Dance: I dislike the Bill. I have always disliked it because (a) it is ill framed, (b) it is ill timed, and (c) it is extremely dangerous.
It is ill framed to the extent that there is no alternative to capital punishment provided for in it. There is no alternative to deter a violent man from committing murder. It is ill timed because it is brought forward at a moment when crimes of violence are very much on the increase. It is dangerous because it endangers every member of the public, as I shall show.
But more than the Bill itself I dislike the way it has been introduced and put before us. The House has been taken in contempt. I wish that the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) would listen to what I am saying. [HON. MEMBERS: "Why should he?"]

Mr. Eric Lubbock: The hon. Member did not listen to the last speech, so why should we listen to his?

Mr. Dance: It was not worth listening to. The arrogance of the promoter has annoyed many people on this side of the House. We put down many good reasoned Amendments, and they have just been turned down by the hon. Gentleman out of hand. He has been completely arrogant and has not listened to the will of many people on this side or to the certain will of millions of people outside the House.
I attack the Government on this, too. On this side we have all the time had a free vote on the Bill.

Mr. Jeremy Thorpe: So have we.

Mr. Dance: The Liberals may have done, but the Government side—I know this for a fact—certainly have not. They have had a two-line whip on it. [Interruption.] This is perfectly fair.

Mr. Walden: No, it is not.

Mr. Dance: I ask the Home Secretary, why the devil have not the Government got the "guts" to back the Bill, this horrible, disgusting and dangerous Bill? Why will they not make it a Government Bill?

Mr. Paget: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Dance: All right.

Mr. Paget: All I wish to say, because I think it is important that this should be on the record, is that the whips have never been put on this side. There has been no two-line or any other line whip. I have not had any advantage of the whips machinery or the pairing machinery. It has been done entirely by private effort.

Mr. Frederic Harris: The hon. and learned Gentleman will also recall that earlier tonight one hon. Member would not leave the House until he could obtain a pair.

Mr. Thomas Swain: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. I have in my hand a note circulated to all Members of the Government party. [An HON. MEMBER: "That is not a point of order."] It is a point of order, in the interests of accuracy, against an accusation made by someone who, I suggest, does not know what he is talking about. It says—[Interruption.]

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Sir Samuel Storey): Order, order. Please allow me to hear the point of order.

Mr. Swain: It says on our Whip: "There will be a free vote", and there are no lines under it at all.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Order. That is not a point of order for the Chair.

Mr. Frederic Harris: Just before that interruption an hon. Gentleman sitting on the Government Front Bench called me a liar. Other people are now saying that what I said was perfectly true. I ask you to be good enough, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, to ask the hon. Member to withdraw that.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: I must know who is the hon. Gentleman or right hon. Gentleman referred to.

Mr. Harris: The right hon. Gentleman for Dudley (Mr. Wigg). He knows he called me a liar.—[Interruption.] I apologise. It was the hon. Member sitting next to him, an Assistant Whip, the hon. Member for Luton (Mr. Howie).

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: I must ask the hon. Member for Luton (Mr. Howie) whether he did refer to the hon. Gentleman the Member for Croydon, North-West (Mr. Frederic Harris) as a liar. If so, he must withdraw it.

The Paymaster-General (Mr. George Wigg): rose—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I am addressing the hon. Member for Luton.

Mr. W. Howie: I most certainly did, and I unreservedly withdraw. I did it in the heat of repeated allegations from the other side.

Mr. Frederic Harris: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. The insinuation is that I said something which was untruthful, and I will not accept that. I ask for your protection.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Untruthful is not out of order, if it is not a deliberate suggestion of lying.

Mr. Thorpe: Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. If the hon. Member for Croydon, North-West (Mr. Frederic Harris) suggested that the party opposite had issued a whip of one, two or three lines and had been told that was a lie, and if, as I hear from the hon. Members opposite that there is substantiation for the proposition that it is untrue, is not the hon. Gentleman wilfully misleading the House by withdrawing the suggestion that it was a lie? Could the hon. Gentleman not be invited to reinstate it on the record?

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: No, he cannot do anything of the sort.

Sir Stephen McAdden: I am bound to point out to you, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, that the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock), in a rather excited condition, has again repeated the allegation that my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North-West (Mr. Frederic Harris) is a liar. Will you instruct him to withdraw the suggestion?

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: If the hon. Member for Orpington did use the word "liar", he, too, must withdraw it.

Mr. Lubbock: If the hon. Member for Croydon, North-West (Mr. Frederic Harris) said something which is not true, then, according to the meaning of English, he must be a liar.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: The hon. Gentleman must withdraw immediately.

Hon. Members: Withdraw.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: I must ask the hon. Member once more to withdraw the expression "liar".

Mr. Paget: On a point of order.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: I am dealing with a point of order. I must ask the hon. Gentleman for the last time to withdraw the expression "liar".

Mr. Lubbock: If the hon. Gentleman said that the Government had a one, two or three line whip on and evidence has been produced that that is not true, then he is guilty of a terminological inexactitude.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: The hon. Member must withdraw the expression "liar".

Mr. Lubbock: In that case, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, I replace the word "lie" with "terminological inexactitude".

Hon. Members: Withdraw.

Mr. Frederic Harris: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. Can I have no further protection from the Chair? [Interruption.] What I said was perfectly accurate. There is no question at all about it. Is it fair that the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) should, in effect, get away with calling me a liar and you do not get him to retract it?

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: The hon. Gentleman has had protection. I have made two hon. Members withdraw the expression. "Terminological inexactitude" is, I believe, a phrase which has been used before.

Mr. F. V. Corfield: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. I have been sitting next to my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North-West (Mr. Frederic Harris) and


all he said was that he had been offered a pair. As far as I know, there is no evidence whatever that this is untrue. I suggest, with all respect, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, that the purely technical withdrawal by the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) is not sufficient.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: I have already ruled that it is sufficient and that "terminological inexactitude" is a phrase for which there is a precedent. Mr. Dance.

Mr. Dance: Following on this rather interesting little discussion that we have had, I think that there may be two versions of the whipping—[Interruption.]

Mr. Sydney Silverman: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. Now that the little fracas about liars and non-liars has ended, is it not the practice of the House that if an hon. Member makes a statement about another hon. Member and the other hon. Member refutes it, the hon. Gentleman who made the original statement either withdraws the statement or proves it? The hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Mr. Dance) made the clear accusation that hon. Members on this side in support of the Bill were subject to an official party whip. I think that that has been denied. I suggest to you, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, that the hon. Member should withdraw the accusation or prove it.

Mr. Goodhew: Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. It might be of help to you to know that yesterday I was approached by a junior Minister asking for a pair tonight since he knew—

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Order. That does not appear to be a point of order. I hope that we may end this and not throw accusations across the House.

Mr. Frederic Harris: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. As I understand it, the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) is still assuming that what I said was incorrect. It does not look as though I am being very fairly treated. I have been in the House long enough to be more fairly treated. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."]

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Order. If the hon. Gentleman wishes to question what I have said from the Chair he must do

so by means of a substantive Motion. Mr. Dance.

Mr. Dance: I have been a Member of the House for a comparatively short time, but during the 10 years that I have been here I do not think I have ever been approached by more members of the Government to pair with me than I have over this debate, which to my mind proves that there must be some sort of whip. [Interruption.] Anyhow, if I am completely inaccurate I am sorry, but I have shown that there seems to have been some coercion put on hon. Members on the other side of the House over this matter. [Interruption.]

Dame Joan Vickers: Perhaps I might point out to my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Mr. Dance) that I have also been approached by hon. Members on this side of the House who wished to pair with me.

Mr. Dance: So there are lunatics on this side of the House as well as on the other.

Mr. William Yates: I have been approached by hon. Members on both sides of the House who wished to pair.

Mr. Dance: The fact remains that I gather that much more coercion—[Interruption.] All right. Shall we leave this point for the moment?
I want to refer to the recent escape from Wandsworth Prison by one of the train robbers. During the weekend, the radio broadcast a statement by the police—and I have never known of this before—that the general public should take no action but get in touch with the police. Why? Because the man concerned was serving a very long sentence—a sentence which I do not think would have been bigger had he been convicted of murder. Thus, he is potentially a very dangerous man. There is no deterrent to his taking life or shooting someone down. No sanction can be taken against him because he has already been sentenced to a very long term.
The Home Secretary, during these proceedings, has rightly laid great stress on the importance of recruiting more police, saying that the way to keep down crime is to have more police on the beat. But


my word! What wonderful recruiting propaganda the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne—

Mr. Arthur Lewis: On a point of order. Is it not the case that on Third Reading one can only refer to what is in the Bill? Is there anything in the Bill about police recruiting?

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: The hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Mr. Dance) is, I think, illustrating his point that he does not approve of what is in the Bill on Third Reading.

Mr. Dance: I merely say, and repeat, what wonderful propaganda for police recruiting this dangerous Bill is going to be. I want to put a hypothetical question to the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne. At any time in his life would he have been prepared to put on a uniform as a policeman and go down to Limehouse on a really foggy, murky night, unarmed, to apprehend an armed criminal, knowing that he had not the protection of the death penalty above him?
The hon. Member does not appear to answer. But that is what he is asking the police to do. Does he want them to be armed? I know that the general public do not and that the police do not. If he does not answer my question presumably that is what he wants, however. [Interruption.] I am attacking the hon. Member and I intend to go on attacking him. Many hon. Members on this side are getting extremely tired—[Interruption]—though not as tired as some hon. Members opposite on the Finance Bill—of the attitude whereby the criminal is always being defended. "Oh, we must look after him." What about the unfortunate victim?
A friend of mine who was driving along quite innocently opened the window and asked someone the direction. He was coshed and he did not become conscious until a month later and he is now paralysed for life. Ought we not to pay a little more attention to him? [HON. MEMBERS: "He was not murdered."] But he might well have been murdered.
I deplore the attitude of hon. Members opposite and those on the Liberal Benches, the attitude that the criminal must always be thought about and must be cared for and that the victim means nothing. [HON. MEMBERS: "Nonsense."]

Hon. Members may think it nonsense, but there are millions upon millions of people who do not think that it is nonsense and who believe that the Bill is dangerous. That is why I implore the House to vote against it.

11.1 p.m.

Mr. Edward Gardner: I refer first to words used by the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) when opening this debate. He said that the purpose of the Bill was to civilise the penal system. In all gravity I submit that the penal system is not civilised by being weakened. It is not civilised if, as many people strongly believe will be the case, we make a nonsense of it.
We all agreed with the hon. Gentleman when in Committee he said that murder was the gravest crime known to English law. The purpose of the Bill, with which we are now all too familiar, is to abolish capital punishment and to substitute for that punishment that form of imprisonment known as life imprisonment. During this momentous debate—and I do not exaggerate, for this is a Bill of great importance—we have to ask ourselves two questions. The first is whether we can safely abolish the death penalty. We ought to bear in mind—because it would be a contempt of public opinion if we were to overlook this—that the majority of people in this country are against abolition of the death penalty.
I agree at once that there is a difficulty, possibly an insuperable difficulty, about deciding just how strong and effective the death penalty is. Statistics may show how many murders and of what types are committed in the course of a year, but statistics never show, never have and never will, how many murders have not been committed because of the presence of the death penalty. We have to remember and respect that point of view. It is a view which is not shared by many who are in favour of the Bill, and I fear—I am trying to be realistic—that it is a view which will be overwhelmed in the Division Lobbies tonight.
The second question is the practical question. It is a question which has to be resolved, and it is not resolved by the Bill. What are we going to put in place of the death penalty as a punishment for murder? The Bill does away with capital


punishment and puts in its place life imprisonment. Life imprisonment is the most uncertain form of punishment known to English law. It has been described accurately as an empty formula. One Archbishop of Canterbury described it as a degradation of the law. It is the only punishment which will be left for murder once the Bill becomes law.
We have to ask, if we are going to act responsibly, "Is this good enough? Can we accept this?" In my opinion—and most hon. and right hon. Members would probably agree with me—the Bill alarms the majority of our people. One thing that it does not do is to frighten the potential killer. Because we have only life imprisonment left, and there is no alternative, it is a fair and serious criticism of the Bill to say that it has no deterrent effect. It has removed the frightening effect which capital punishment undoubtedly had.

Mr. Thorpe: I am listening to the hon. and learned Member's argument with the respect which it demands. Will he address his mind to the statistics which the right hon. Member for Hampstead (Mr. Brooke) put before the House in the Second Reading debate relating to those murders committed since 1957 which were of a non-capital nature and those murders committed since 1957 which carried the penalty of capital punishment? They would seem to indicate that the latter category did not in any way carry a greater deterring factor than the former category. Will he address his mind to the question whether the post-1957 experience indicates that the punishment for the capital crime has deterred people more than the punishment for the non-capital crime?

Mr. Gardner: I do not know whether the hon. Member for Devon, North (Mr. Thorpe) was here when my figures were rehearsed. I understand that he was. I introduced this facet of the argument with a frank statement that the statistics did not assist us. I say with emphasis and with some cogency that if persons argue that the death penalty can be removed safely they have a duty to satisfy the country about it, and I do not believe that they have done so. I know that some people disagree with me about this, but in my opinion the statistics to which the

hon. Member for Devon, North referred can be argued in two directions. In this matter I place the burden of proof firmly and squarely on the shoulders of those who wish to abolish capital punishment.
I now return to the point that I was asking the House to consider, because it is the essence of the debate. What shall we put in the place of capital punishment? I do not believe that life imprisonment, as such—whatever it may mean—is adequate. I believe that we need something else. I agree with the Home Secretary that there are some murders for which life imprisonment is a suitable sentence—but there are other forms of murder for which it is not suitable or adequate, and it is wholly wrong to give the potential killer the feeling that he can have at the moment, with justification, that if he kills the only thing that can happen to him is to be sentenced to life imprisonment, which, in the past, has meant an average of nine years' imprisonment.
I listened with great interest to the speech of the hon. and learned Member for Montgomery (Mr. Hooson). He drew upon his personal experience, and upon Arthur Koestler and his various views, to satisfy himself and this House that we were right tonight to vote for this Bill to abolish capital punishment. Personal experiences are not always a sure guide, but he has given one to satisfy the House that we can safely dispense with capital punishment and, presumably, without any alternative punishment except life imprisonment.
May I be allowed to make one personal illustration and call upon my own experience in defending a young man? He was about 18½ and had kicked to death with two young companions a young man and did this because he wanted to steal money which he believed the young man had in his pocket. As his victim was dying in the roadway he leaned over him and put his hand into the dying man's waistcoat pocket. There was 14s. 5½d. in that waistcoat pocket, but just as he was about to extract the money from the pocket he heard footsteps approaching.
He withdrew his hand, ran off and was later caught by the police. He was brought to the police station and later I saw him. The hon. and learned Member for Montgomery told the House what was said to him on such an occasion


by a person who was convicted of murder. This young man said to the police: "Oh, well, I will only get five to nine years for this. It is a life job." He was then told that this was capital murder because it was done in the course or furtherance of theft, and he said—and I do not quote his exact words—"Well, if I had known that I would have thought again before trying to take money in that way".
If you put one personal illustration in one direction, here is another in the opposite direction. If you are going to take notice of one, surely you must take notice of the other.
I am concerned mainly with the alternative punishment. It seems to me—and I do not want to use colourful or exaggerated language about so serious a subject—that if you do away with capital punishment and introduce in its place only life imprisonment, you are in effect giving the professional criminal what can well be regarded as a licence to kill. Why should a criminal who might, if he were found guilty of robbery, be sent to prison for 30 years, hesitate to shoot his way out of his predicament if he knows he will go for life imprisonment which may be no longer than nine years?
I do not believe it makes sense. Whatever this House may do tonight, and most of us can anticipate the result when we go into the Division Lobbies, whatever we do in passing a Bill at this stage will be done against the will of the majority of the people in this country. This Bill takes an anomaly which appears in the Homicide Act of 1957, one of the worst anomalies of the Act, perpetuates it and extends it to all forms of murder. This is an extremely serious anomaly which makes a nonsense for lawyers. This is why, in reply to the remark of the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne about civilising the penal system of this country, I was able to say, "You do not civilise it by making a nonsense of it".
The Bill makes a nonsense of it because once it becomes law, anyone who commits a murder will be sentenced to the automatic punishment of life imprisonment; whereas if the killing is done under provocation or if it is a killing by someone who is mentally affected so that he is suffering from diminished responsibility, that person

will be found guilty of manslaughter, and under the Offences Against The Person Act the punishment may be either life imprisonment or any sentence which the trial judge at his discretion imposes. We have gone past the stage of attempting to introduce into the Bill an Amendment which would have the effect of giving the trial judge in cases of murder the very same powers as those which he has for manslaughter. The result is that this anomaly, which I believe to be very serious, will cover the whole range of murder.
We have done nothing in the House—although, Heaven knows, we have tried—to cure that anomaly. What has astonished me has been the view taken by the Home Secretary. "Life imprisonment", the agument runs—and it has the support of the Home Secretary—"will do for all forms of murder." No thought of any kind has been given among those supporting the Bill to an alternative punishment. No one has directed his mind to any form of alternative punishment.
The Bill in its present form simply will not do. It is a bad Bill, it is a dangerous Bill, and if it is passed it will be passed in contempt of public opinion.

11.18 p.m.

Mr. Henry Brooke: I had not intended to take part in the Third Reading debate. I expressed my views on Second Reading and both sides of the House were good enough to listen to me on that occasion with attention. I have nothing to retract from what I said then and very little to add.
Afterwards I was congratulated—I do not know why—on having made a courageous speech. It did not seem to require courage then. It requires rather more courage to speak from these benches on the same lines at this moment. But I have risen to speak because the statistics which I quoted on Second Reading have been challenged. I seek to remind the House that those statistics still stand. Statistics prove nothing in this case. They are indications but they are not a proof. I am sure that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Sir J. Hobson), who quoted some statistics designed to counteract mine would accept that view of all statistics.

Sir J. Hobson: I did not quote statistics designed for any purpose. I quoted figures given by the Home Secretary in a Written Answer of 17th June.

Mr. Brooke: I have that here. My right hon. and learned Friend chose two sets of three years whereas the figures which I quoted were rather more extensive and far-reaching as they covered two sets of six years. These figures show that whereas the abolition of the death penalty for non-capital murder in 1957 ought, on the theory of the unique deterrent, to have brought about a tremendous fall in the ratio of capital to non-capital murders, in fact it did not. In fact, the ratio hardly altered at all, but that, as I have said, is only an indication, though perhaps a disproof of some of the more extreme statements about the deterrent power of the death penalty.
Some of the speeches this evening have given me an uncomfortable feeling that I am nearer to the criminal classes than some of my hon. and right hon. Friends. They speak, it seems to me, with great knowledge of the way in which hardened criminals react to situations. They have, very sincerely, given the impression that the criminal is terrified of the death sentence but treats the prospect of nine or ten years in prison as nothing more than a fleabite.
Believe me, that is really not so. If I had no opinion about it before, I should certainly have learned it during my contact with all sorts of people through the Home Office. To be shut away from the ordinary free life of this country and suddenly deprived of all liberty for as long as nine or ten years is a terrible fate. It is a great deterrent.

Mr. Percy Grieve: Would my right hon. Friend be so good as to say whether he considers a life sentence any deterrent to a man already serving thirty years should he choose to use firearms to effect an escape? Would he say what is to take its place if the death penalty goes?

Mr. Brooke: I accept at once that the five or six people in this country who are now in custody and serving sentences of thirty years obviously cannot be deterred from further crimes if they escape from prison by anything short of the death penalty. I grant that at once, but

I do not think that these five or six people constitute a sufficient argument in themselves for retaining the death penalty over the whole field of capital murder. I agree that the case for the retentionists has been considerably strengthened by the events at Wandsworth prison last week and at Birmingham during the time when I was Home Secretary, but I must say here that I am sorry my successor has not felt able to follow up my suggestion of the appointment of a special expert security officer which I put forward during my last weeks at the Home Office. If that had been done, I think that Biggs might still have been in custody.
However, that is speculation. In my view, the figures which I gave to the House during the Second Reading debate and which I have given again this evening do not in any way support the more extreme statements made in the House about the value of the death penalty as a deterrent. I ask the House to accept it from me that the vast majority of people—not the five or six already serving thirty years or more, and perhaps a handful of others—treat the thought that if they are caught they will be shut up for a long period of years as a very real deterrent.
I have listened for many hours during the different stages of this Bill, upstairs and on the Floor of the House, and I regret that the Home Secretary did not say at an early stage of our proceedings that if this Bill became law he would think it right that where murderers are serving life imprisonment because the law has not allowed them to be sentenced to death and where there are no compassionate circumstances, they will have to be kept in prison for a substantially longer period than has been the case hitherto for the people who are alive today because compassionate considerations in their histories led the Home Secretary of the day to reprieve them.
I do not think that averages are of great value in this matter. I know, and my successor knows and my predecessors as Home Secretary knew, that the normal term of imprisonment for a person who was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder was nine years. Believe me, if the criminal does not know that beforehand, he discovers it very soon after he


has gone into prison. The sentence of life imprisonment is not something which makes any man smile. He knows at that stage the full uncertainty of it. He discovers from his fellow prisoners that it is most unlikely that he will be let out within nine years unless there is a very special factor in his case.
I would like it to have been made clear by the Home Secretary that anybody who committed murder which was not liable to the death penalty and did not carry with it any compassionate circumstances must expect normally to spend 15 years in prison. I believe that drastic alterations in our custodial arrangements will need to be made in any event so that men can be kept in prison for long periods of time without rotting, as they are liable to do, in the ordinary prison cell.
I hope that the Home Secretary acknowledges that, because he has gone so far as to say that in certain circumstances men may have to be kept in prison for the rest of their lives. I trust that they will not have to be kept in prison under the existing arrangements as I know them in the various prisons that are available.
The Bill must be regarded as experimental, and Clause 3 now enacts that. I know that the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) is against that Clause. I am glad that he decided not to seek to have it removed. I think that the only way of allaying the disquiet that may be widespread throughout the country about the passage of the Bill is to make it absolutely clear that this experiment is on trial. It should be on trial, because neither the hon. Member nor my right hon. and hon. Friends who have spoken against the Bill can prove their case. Nothing can prove the case except experience. Five years may be too short a time, it may be too long a time, but I do not believe that one can run an experiment for ever. It seems to me that if the Bill becomes law, in five years' time we shall all know a great deal more than we do today, and we shall have had the benefit of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Penal System, which may help us with the terribly difficult problem of sentencing, on which we have spent so much time.
I end with this thought. The House was good enough to listen to me with some attention on Second Reading. I apologise for taking up time now, but I submit that it would be not consonant with the importance of the subject if we were to divide on it at 4 o'clock in the morning. It would be wise, if we could, to seek to come to a conclusion at an earlier hour than that. I only make that appeal. It may not be right, it may not be possible, because I know that a number of hon. Members still wish to speak. I apologise for speaking at all, but I thought that possibly the House would desire me to do so.

11.30 p.m.

Mr. J. E. B. Hill: Much of the ten years that I have been in the House has been taken up with debates on this subject. Hitherto I have never sought to intervene, and I do so with great trepidation tonight, particularly following my right hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead (Mr. Brooke), whose speech I found moving and impressive. It was moving because he has had to do something which I have not, and I thank God that I have not, and that is to operate the 1957 Act.
I remember his speech on the Second Reading debate describing how the painful experience of acting as Home Secretary converted him to becoming an abolitionist. It so happens that I am a marginal retentionist, and I believe that the 1957 Act was as an acceptable a solution to the dilemma which faced us as human wit could devise. At any rate, it covered those categories of capital murder in which I would like to see the death penalty retained, notably those cases where it would protect the police and persons attempting to assist the police and prison officers. I regret that the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) was unable to accept the Amendment on those lines.
I described myself as a marginal retentionist because I accept that in the fulness of time capital punishment should go, but I would hope that with it would go excessive criminal violence. However, I see no sign of that at the moment. I accept that capital punishment in general does not operate as a deterrent to murder, but I believe that it has been some deterrent to excessive violence in crime. I confess that I felt very disturbed at the


great increase in the crimes of violence not only over pre-war standards but particularly since 1955.
There has been some dispute about the correct interpretation to be put on the statistics of murder since the 1957 Act. Even following my right hon. Friend's view of the statistics, I expected to see some rise in capital murders after the 1957 Act proportionate to the increase in crimes of violence. I find it significant that the rate did not rise and, therefore, I argue, although I accept that it cannot be proved, that there is some evidence that capital punishment has acted as a deterrent to excessive violence in crime, particularly those crimes which might lead to capital murder. This deterrent may have acted all the way down the criminal code. I wonder whether it is too fanciful to suppose that the British professional criminal by tradition has used no more force than necessary to achieve his criminal purpose. There is some evidence that, generally, professional criminals have hitherto been against the carrying of guns. We do not know enough about the detailed pattern of crimes of violence. The pamphlet "Murder" has been of great assistance to us, but we still do not know, for example, what weapons are used in armed robbery and what weight of violence exists down through the crimes which have not resulted in murder but only in violence falling short of murder. In Committee, the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) said, in answer to my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Mr. Deedes), that murderers cannot be deterred and that we all have inhibitions against killing, except for a tiny minority, from whom the murderers come.
I disagree with the hon. and learned Member, but again there is no certainty. If his thesis is correct, I should have expected the proportion of murderers in the population to be roughly comparable in similar societies everywhere. One of the difficulties in all comparisons is that we cannot compare like with like, but I suggest that conditions in the United States of America are not wholly dissimilar to those in this country. There is, broadly speaking, an Anglo-Saxon tradition, an industrial society, high standards of living, considerable contrasts of poverty and wealth and social and racial tensions.

What is significant is that the murder rate in the United States is about 40 per million of the population, which is roughly ten times the rate in this country. I asked myself why this should be so. In America there is both capital punishment and non-capital punishment in the different States, but the overall pattern is 40 murders per million.
I cannot explain that difference by the deterrent effect of capital punishment. I found myself asking whether the difference may not spring from a different tradition of violence. Is there a different historical and psychological attitude to it? I advance a view which seems to me to be only a possible clue, that in the United States of America the Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees to every citizen the right to keep and bear arms, in theory to defend his home. This is—if for the wrong reasons today—jealously argued as a justification for the possession of firearms. It is based historically on the tradition of the uncertain frontier—

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Dr. Horace King): Order. What the hon. Gentleman says is very interesting, but he is getting away from the Third Reading of the Bill.

Mr. Hill: I was hoping to contrast those conditions with the tradition in this country, which is relevant to the Bill. The British tradition is quite different. It is a tradition of the Queen's peace which goes back to at least the twelfth century or earlier. By this tradition, it is the citizen's duty to keep it and to assist the police in preventing its breach. That tradition obtained until quite recently. In this fast-changing age, all our traditions seem to be under criticism. It is not untrue to say that most of our standards are being challenged and that some are in a state of flux. Therefore, my anxiety is that our recognition that we are living in times of rapid change may lead us—perhaps unwittingly—to alter our general attitude to crimes of violence. If, therefore, Parliament can be thought—however much this may be misinterpreting our attitude—to be relaxing its abhorrence of capital murder, some members of the public, particularly the criminal or potentially criminal members of it, may think that they must accept violence as an expected hazard in real life as well as in fiction.
I do not want to weaken the readiness of the public to assist the police in the repression of crime. As I said, I believe that the 1957 Act broadly met the difficulties. I should prefer to have continued that Act, at least until 1970, although I am glad that the new Clause was accepted because it will give us a chance of looking at the whole situation again. I would have liked to have had more experience of the working of the 1957 Act, both in regard to the incidence of capital murder and to the treatment of non-capital murderers. I would have liked to have known more about the attitude of the police towards the Bill. It is unfortunate that, being a Private Member's Bill, it may be that the Government were not able to conduct all the consultations they would have conducted had it been a Government Measure. We might then have known, for example, whether the police will wish to be armed when the Bill becomes law.
I wish I had the supreme self-confidence of the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne that he is right. I retain my doubts. I cannot help retaining them until I see an assured decline in crimes of violence and be satisfied that the Government know more about the causation of crime and the future treatment of life prisoners. The question is whether the Bill will produce a change in the public, especially the criminal's attitude to violence, for better or for worse. I confess to a feeling of pessimism. I hope that events will prove me wrong, but, as matters stand tonight, I cannot support the Bill.

11.43 p.m.

Sir Peter Rawlinson: The views expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Norfolk, South (Mr. J. E. B. Hill) are common to very many people, including many hon. Members. It is now about eight months since the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) moved the Second Reading of the Bill. I was the first speaker in reply and in opposition on that occasion. I have, during the course of those eight months, missed only one or two of the debates on the Measure, either in Committee upstairs or on the floor of the House.
We have, in terms of Parliamentary time, spent 50 hours discussing the Bill. That, from the point of view of the

Patronage Secretary or anyone else in charge of Government business, is a considerable amount of Parliamentary time. However, it represents five minutes being allowed to each Member of Parliament—that is, of each hon. and right hon. Member wished to speak on the matter—five minutes for each to express his or her views on something which is of the greatest importance to the general public, particularly to those who we insist look after the safety and security of the community.
It is to be regretted that some people tend to snigger at the attitude which is taken by some of us towards the Bill. As the House has been reminded, we sit here in reasonable and relative peace. The worst that may happen to us is that we may get a few insults thrown at us, couched in the careful language of Parliament. We sit here and debate this matter, we talk about various cases and discuss the thing rather like an academic exercise. Views are expressed, sometimes frivolous views, but it is to other people that we have entrusted a task which no one can pretend is not a task of the greatest danger and gravity. To sit calmly may be the appropriate posture for a deliberate and grave assembly of legislators, but the House should nevertheless express its sense of urgency in considering the present situation, with the whole fabric of our society assaulted by organised crime, and bearing in mind all the rewards of crime and the risks that criminals will run. It is something about which all our constituents feel very deeply and gravely.
In the Bill's seven-month course there have emerged certain political lessons, quite apart from the across-the-House debating—although most of the debate has come from my right hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Handsworth (Sir E. Boyle) and for Hampstead (Mr. Brooke), with little from the other side, except from the promoter of the Bill. Some of these Parliamentary reformers about whom we hear and read were not very much in evidence; this side was debating this issue with only members of the Government and some officials of the House present.
I say to the Home Secretary—although not personally, of course, but to the Government which he represents tonight—that his Government has behaved in this


matter in a craven fashion. This was a Bill that the Government should have taken over after it had received its Second Reading, while allowing each hon. Member to vote according to his conscience. That would have been the right way in which to treat the House over something that is so much a House of Commons matter.
But the argument rests finally on matters of judgment, and my judgment here is as good as that of hon. Members opposite, and theirs is as good as mine. The judgment one has to make is whether by Act of Parliament we do anything which will render probable or likely the death of others outside the House who are entitled to look to us to see that the Executive ensure the Queen's peace. That is a matter of judgment. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead has rightly said that statistics are not the determining factor in this matter, but we all know that one statistic is the increase in violent crime which is being inflicted on the people day in and night out. It is the form and pattern of violence and violent crime that we see daily around us.
During the Second Reading debate I asked the Home Secretary whether he had any evidence of the increase in organised gang warfare; whether there was evidence of protection rackets having developed; whether more criminals were armed, and whether there had been a change in the last few months and years in this pattern of crime. Those are the questions that must be answered before anyone can make a judgment on this subject.
There is nobody here who does not know how ugly it is. We have been regaled by the hon. and learned Member for Montgomery (Mr. Hooson) with instances of what happened in the eighteenth century, in conditions when there were no police except for a few Bow Street runners, which meant that there had to be the supreme deterrent for almost every crime. There were entirely different conditions and circumstances. One cannot compare the 18th or 19th century with the present day.

Mr. David Steel: Do I understand that if the right hon. and learned Gentleman had lived in the 18th century he would

have defended capital punishment for theft of property?

Sir P. Rawliason: The hon. Gentleman is too naive, and this is too serious a matter for that kind of intervention. I was pointing out that there was capital punishment in the 18th century because of conditions at that time, the circumstances of life, of crime and the need to protect human beings. I do not live in the 18th century, so I do not know how I should have voted. But we are called upon to vote in 1965, responsible as we are for thousands of people outside, responsible to the 20,000 people who, between now and next year, will suffer violence upon themselves. We should take this issue seriously and apply proper judgment to it.
As I said on Second Reading, I believe that we have seen a change in the pattern of crime. There has been a change in the threat to our society. The British people look to us, and through us to the Executive, to see that nothing is done to weaken their position in these circumstances. Since the war, we seem to have bred an evil and vicious type of criminal. I do not know whether it is a consequence of the great troubles the world has gone through and the threats which still rest over it, but there has, without doubt, been this change.
How successful has so-called progressive thought been? How well have the new ways of dealing with crime met the problems which face us? There is a steady growth of crime, and all the time there are suggestions for a different attitude towards the criminal. They may be right, but let no one forget that the people of this country are getting sick and tired of proposals to try to change criminals when they see daily their property and themselves being threatened and the State is unable even to keep in detention those criminals who have been sent to prison.
I hope that a secure system of imprisonment will be created. I hope that it will be given absolute priority. I agree with some of my hon. Friends who wondered why this Bill was introduced if we were not able to provide a proper system for men who were sentenced to life imprisonment.
What about the alternative sentence of which the Bill speaks when capital punishment is abolished? We had debates


in the House about this, with little opposition, calling for a real alternative to capital punishment. But we have not got it in the Bill, and this is one of its major defects. After voting as a matter of conscience on whether capital punishment should be abolished, the House then debated the alternative, and at that time, when there were, I think, eight members present on the Government side, four of them came into the Lobby with us. They had heard the argument. I only wish that more hon. Members had been here to hear the argument which my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Sir J. Hobson) addressed to the House this evening.
This, I suppose, is the culmination of our proceedings on the Bill in this House. If it is given a Third Reading, goes through another place, and becomes law, we shall have enacted a Measure which does not have the support of the public. It does not have the support of those people whom we trust to maintain law and order. We shall have taken a calculated gamble.
The judgment of right hon. Gentlemen and hon. Gentlemen opposite may be correct, but it is a calculated gamble with other people's lives. Therefore, I remain, as I was when the Bill was first before the House in December, opposed to the principle, and I am opposed to it not in anger, but certainly with apprehension. I trust that the hon. Gentleman who has introduced this Bill with as much determination and persistence as we have opposed it and to whom, I suppose, this evening must be the culmination of many long and weary hours, realises that he takes upon his shoulders and upon his judgment all these apprehensions. I hope to God he is correct. But, because I do not think he is correct, I am going to vote against his Bill.

11.56 p.m.

Sir Geoffrey de Freitas: On behalf of the sponsors of the Bill, I should like to clear up two matters which were discussed earlier and which led to some heat. A good many words were said and withdrawn during the exchanges.
The first point is that at no stage have the Government issued a Whip.

Mr. Dance: Nonsense.

Sir G. de Freitas: At no stage have the Government issued a Whip.

Mr. R. J. Maxwell-Hyslop: If that is the case, why should Government Parliamentary Private Secretary's have approached hon. Members on this side on behalf of their Ministers in order to seek pairs?

Sir G. de Freitas: The hon. Gentleman was not here earlier, and he does not know the point to which I am replying. The Government have at no stage issued a Whip. The point about Parliamentary Private Secretaries and others approaching hon. Members on the other side seeking pairs is very simple. My hon. Friend and I and a few other hon. Members who are acting as sponsors of the Bill have done everything we can to organise a private Whip system, which is a perfectly legitimate plan. We have organised it with discrimination. It never occurred to us, for instance, to get someone to pair with the hon. Lady for Plymouth, Devonport (Miss Vickers), because we know she is an abolitionist. It would never have occurred to us to treat the hon. and gallant Member for Portsmouth, West (Brigadier Clarke) as being in that category, because we know his attitude. So we organised a pairing system. That is the explanation of what I know bothered the hon. Member for Croydon, North-West (Mr. Frederic Harris) earlier and the hon. Member for Tiverton (Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop) who has just intervened.

Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop: Then, why the Parliamentary Private Secretaries?

Sir G. de Freitas: I have had a Parliamentary Private Secretary and I have been a Parliamentary Private Secretary myself, and I know that one has a close relationship with one's Minister. What could be more natural than for a Minister to say to his Parliamentary Private Secretary "See if you can find me a 'hanger' to pair with"?

Brigadier Clarke: On that wonderful explanation for the fact that the Government side have not got a Whip, may I say that I was very surprised that anyone could believe that that side of the House could be 100 per cent. wrong.

Sir G. de Freitas: That is an interesting point, and no doubt it will go


down in the hon. and gallant Member's reminiscences.
I made the point because I think it is important, since there was so much talk about it earlier in the debate.

Mr. Peter Bessell: The hon. Member for Kettering (Sir G. de Freitas) has stated that at no stage has the Government Whip been applied. Is it not a fact that, following the Second Reading debate, a vote was taken on whether the Bill should be considered by a Committee of the whole House or in Committee upstairs, and was not a Government Whip applied then?

Sir G. de Freitas: It is well known that that was a procedural matter, not concerned with the Bill as such.—[An HON. MEMBER: "Nonsense."]—It was nothing to do with the Bill at all.

Mr. Rees-Davies: rose—

Sir G. de Freitas: I repeat: there is no Whip.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Dr. Horace King): Order. I think that we have pursued the subject of Whips and Parliamentary Private Secretaries long enough. I hope that the hon. Member for Kettering (Sir G. de Freitas) will come to the Bill.

Sir G. de Freitas: That was my intention, Mr. Deputy-Speaker—

Mr. Rees-Davies: The debate is in Government time tonight.

Sir G. de Freitas: I know that there are many hon. Members who wish to prolong this debate and if you direct me, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, to come to the Bill, I am not able to go charging off after these interventions, and I will not do so.
I have time to take up only one or two of the recent points. The hon. Member for Norfolk, South (Mr. J. E. B. Hill) interested me by his quiet sincere discussion of the statistics, and his doubt whether they proved deterrence or otherwise. He gave us some very interesting figures and referred to their limitations and showed how genuinely puzzled he was. He is right. There are difficulties. He referred to the statistics from the United States. But if he had pursued the point a little further he would, I think, have realised that one of the important

factors is that with adjoining States like Maine and New Hampshire or Rhode Island and Massachusetts, where one has no capital punishment and the other has, the murder rate is the same in each. This is an important fact which emerges from a lot of data from the United States.
It was the right hon. and learned Member for Epsom (Sir P. Rawlinson) who brought us to the essential point, that we have to rely on judgment and that the statistics can only help us to come to our conclusion. But I think it is right for us to draw on the experience of others. It is difficult at this stage, after seven months of discussion, to bring new matter in, but I should like right hon. and hon. Members to look for one moment at our neighbours on the Continent. I was one of those who felt disappointed when we were deprived today of a debate on Europe and our relations with it. I am sorry that we did not have it, because I think that it would have conditioned us a little more to this debate. We are getting nearer and nearer to our Continental neighbours, and more and more they learn from us and more and more we learn from them. After all, we are not so very different. We have a common civilisation, many common institutions and many common laws.
The fact is that only two of our 16 Continental neighbours find it necessary to have the death penalty. I am not saying that that is an overwhelming argument, but surely it is something that we should consider if, as so many of us feel today, there is so much in our common European institutions and civilisation. The point which concerns me above all others—at this time one cannot range over all the points—is the power of the State. We are in a period when the State has enormous powers of destruction over not only its own citizens but other people. Therefore, every one of us should insist that the State does everything to foster every instinct and belief that human life is the most important thing there is and should set an example, above all others, by not taking life itself.
During these debates over the months many arguments have been used. I do not think that any Bill has been more seriously considered. My hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) deserves the congratulations of all the supporters of the Bill not


only for his work over the last seven months but for his work over the last nearly 30 years. The right hon. Member for Hampstead (Mr. Brooke) drew our attention to the fact that it was getting late and that it was, he felt, inappropriate that we should decide this important issue in the early hours. It is too late to persuade or convince—we should now respect each other's opinion. I hope that we can now come to a conclusion. I hope that this Bill will be given its Third Reading.

Mr. Paget: On a point of order. I beg to move, That the Question be now put.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: I cannot accept that Motion at this moment.

12.5 a.m.

Mr. Bessell: I am very glad to have the opportunity of speaking briefly, for no issue has aroused such passionate feelings both in the House and the country. I should like immediately to pay my tribute, as other hon. Members have done, to the hon. Member for Nelson a id Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) not only for the way in which he has brought in this Bill but for the persistence with which he has fought his cause through so many years. I do not think that either retentionists or abolitionists can do other than respect and praise his honesty and integrity in this matter.
I make no bones about the fact that, like my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Montgomery (Mr. Hooson), I have always, throughout my adult life, been an abolitionist. I have always felt that it was entirely wrong that we as a people, and as a civilised people, should use, as a punishment or deterrent, hanging, which cannot be regarded as other than a most uncivilised and bestial performance.
Throughout the three General Election campaigns and the one by-election campaign that I have fought in the last 10 years, and throughout the 20 years that I have appeared on political platforms, I have always answered with an unequivocal "Yes" the question whether I was in favour of the abolition of capital punishment.
It was for that reason that I was very glad that, by one means or another, this

Bill was introduced, and the words which the hon. Gentleman used at the end of his Second Reading speech made a deep impression upon me and, indeed, summed up the feelings of many of us who have regarded this matter with anxiety for years. He said:
But in this darkness and gloom into which the twentieth century civilisation has so far led us we can at least light this small candle and see how far its tiny beams can penetrate the gloom."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 21st December, 1964; Vol. 704, c. 890.]
They were memorable words.
However, as the Bill proceeded through its various stages, I am bound to confess that I had to ask myself whether, over the years, I had not been guided more by emotion than by logic and I was disturbed, particularly when the Bill was upstairs in Committee, to see how impossible it was to persuade the sponsors to accept any Amendments which were tabled, often to very good purpose. For that reason I was glad when the opportunity arose for the Bill to be returned to the Floor of the House, and during the long Committee stage I was able to attend all but one of the sittings and to take part in them.
For me it was a struggle, because I felt that it was impossible to ignore the representations which had been made not only to me but to many other hon. Members by, for example, the police and prison officer associations. I felt that we could not ignore those representations or treat them with complete contempt. I therefore hoped that the sponsors of the Bill would find it possible to accept some of the reasonable Amendments which were put forward by hon. Members from the Conservative Benches. I separated from my hon. Friends on the Liberal Bench by voting for many of those Amendments. I found it a matter of great regret that the Amendment which would have retained capital punishment as a deterrent against the murder of a police officer in the execution of his duty was defeated. It is notable that during the stages of the Bill a very similar measure was introduced in the State of New York providing for the abolition of the death penalty, except in the case of—

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman cannot now advocate an Amendment which has not been incorporated into the Bill.

Mr. Bessell: I am grateful for your guidance, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. I was merely trying to make the point that the Bill would have been better and more acceptable if it had been on the lines of that adopted in the State of New York.
However, the one Amendment which was made, and which is now an integral part of the Bill, was that to make the Bill operative for five years only. This is important for one specific reason, namely, that we as hon. Members have no mandate from the electorate to introduce the Bill in the sense that neither the Government, as the Labour Party fighting the last election, nor my own party, the Liberal Party, included the abolition of capital punishment in its election manifesto.

Mr. Sydney Silverman: I know that the hon. Gentleman wants to be fair and we are all listening to him with great attention and interest. It is perfectly true that it was not in anybody's election manifesto, but it never has been. It was not in the election manifesto of the Conservative Government which brought in what became the Homicide Act, 1957, and it has not been in an election manifesto since. But it is perfectly right that Governments and Parliaments should make up their minds as genuine democratic representatives and not mandatees in matters of the criminal law. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will recognise that, whether the point he is making is valid or invalid, it is equally applicable to every other stage in this controversy and in every other aspect of the criminal law.

Mr. Bessell: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making the point which I was about to make myself. I recognise that there is no demand upon a Government to have a mandate on any issue. We are here as representatives of the people and not as delegates. I accept that without question. But because this has been

a controversial issue for many years and because it has been clearly in the minds of many of us—and I include myself—to seek an opportunity to abolish capital punishment at the earliest chance, we should have put this issue to the electorate at the last General Election.

The issue has been resolved for me by virtue of the fact that the Amendment which was proposed by the right hon. Member for Hampstead (Mr. Brooke) was accepted in Committee, and has not been opposed by the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne. It means that every hon. and right hon. Member will have to face this issue at the next General Election fairly and frankly. When this matter comes up for reconsideration at the end of the five-year period we shall be asked what our intentions are, and how we shall vote. That being the case, I can vote for the Bill tonight. I can do so because I know that in doing so I shall be answerable to the electorate not only for my actions tonight but for my future behaviour.

If the Clause had not been accepted—if the Bill had abolished capital punishment for all time—I should not have felt able to vote for it, but because the Bill in its amended form meets the strongest objection that I have always had, namely, that we have no mandate from the electorate and have no means of knowing whether we are carrying out the real wishes of the people, I can support the Bill. If we had not met that objection I should not have been able to vote for it, but in the circumstances I do so with a thankful heart, because I want to be rid of this bestial form of punishment as quickly as possible.

Mr. Paget: rose in his place and claimed to move, That the Question be now put.

Question put, That the Question be now put:—

The House divided: Ayes 187, Noes 73.

de Freitas, Sir Geoffrey
Jones, Dan (Burnley)
Powell, Rt. Hn. J. Enoch


Delargy, Hugh
Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)
Probert, Arthur


Dell, Edmund
Jones, T. W. (Merioneth)
Ramsden, Rt. Hn. James


Diamond, Rt. Hn. John
Joseph, Rt. Hn. Sir Keith
Randall, Harry


Dodds, Norman
Kenyon, Clifford
Rees, Merlyn


Driberg, Tom
Kerr, Mrs. Anne (R'ter &amp; Chatham)
Reynolds, G. W.


Duffy, Dr. A. E. P.
Kerr, Dr. David (W'worth, Central)
Richard, Ivor


Dunn, James A.
Lawson, George
Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)


English, Michael
Lewis, Arthur (West Ham, N.)
Robinson, Rt. Hn. K. (St. Pancras, N.)


Ennals, David
Loughlin, Charles
Rodgers, William (Stockton)


Ensor, David
Lubbock, Eric
Rogers, George (Kensington, N.)


Evans, Ioan (Birmingham, Yardley)
McBride, Neil
Ross, Rt. Hn. William


Fernyhough, E.
MacColl, James
Shore, Peter (Stepney)


Finch, Harold (Bedwellty)
MacDermot, Niall
Short, Rt. Hn. E. (N'c'tle-on-Tyne, C.)


Fitch, Alan (Wigan)
McInnes, James
Short, Mrs. Renée (W'hampton, N. E.)


Fletcher, Ted (Darlington)
Mackie, George Y. (C'ness &amp; S'land)
Silkin, John (Deptford)


Floud, Bernard
Mackie, John (Enfield, E.)
Silverman, Julius (Aston)


Foley, Maurice
Mahon, Peter (Preston, S.)
Silverman, Sydney (Nelson)


Foot, Sir Dingle (Ipswich)
Mahon, Simon (Bootle)
Skeffington, Arthur


Foot, Michael (Ebbw Vale)
Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfield, E.)
Slater, Mrs. Harriet (Stoke, N.)


Ford, Ben
Manuel, Archie
Slater, Joseph (Sedgefield)


Fraser, Rt. Hn. Tom (Hamilton)
Maude, Angus
Small, William


Ginsburg, David
Maxwell, Robert
Snow, Julian


Gresham Cooke, R.
Mendelson, J. J.
Soskice, Rt. Hn. Sir Frank


Grey, Charles
Mikardo, Ian
Swain, Thomas


Grieve, Percy
Millan, Bruce
Swingler, Stephen


Griffiths, Rt. Hn. James (Llanelly)
Miller, Dr. M. S.
Taverne, Dick


Griffiths, Will (M'chester, Exchange)
Milne, Edward (Blyth)
Teeling, Sir William


Hale, Leslie
Molloy, William
Thornton, Erneset


Hamilton, James (Bothwell)
Morris, Alfred (Wythenshawe)
Thorpe, Jeremy


Hamling, William (Woolwich, W.)
Mulley, Rt. Hn. Frederick (Sheffield Pk)
Tinn, James


Hannan, William
Murray, Albert
Tuck, Raphael


Harper, Joseph
Newens, Stan
Urwin, T. W.


Harrison, Walter (Wakefield)
Noel-Baker, Francis (Swindon)
Varley, Eric G.


Hart, Mrs. Judith
Noel-Baker, Rt. Hn. Philip (Derby, S.)
Walden, Brian (All Saints)


Hattersley, Roy
Norwood, Christopher
Walker, Harold, (Doncaster)


Hazell, Bert
Oakes, Gordon
Wallace, George


Heffer, Eric S.

Watkins, Tudor


Hobden, Dennis (Brighton, K'town)
Ogden, Eric
Wells, William (Walsall, N.)


Hooson, H. E.
O'Malley, Brian
White, Mrs. Eirene


Houghton, Rt. Hn. Douglas
Oram, Albert E. (E. Ham, S.)
Whitelaw, William


Howarth, Harry (Wellingborough)
Orbach, Maurice
Whitlock, William


Howell, Denis (Small Heath)
Orme, Stanley
Wilkins, W. A.


Howie, W.
Oswald, Thomas
Willey, Rt. Hn. Frederick


Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)
Page, Derek (King's Lynn)
Williams, Clifford (Abertillery)


Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)
Paget, R. T.
Williams, Mrs. Shirley (Hitchin)


Hunter, Adam (Dunfermline)
Palmer, Arthur
Willis, George (Edinburgh, E.)


Irving, Sydney (Dartford)
Parker, John
Wilson, William (Coventry, S.)


Jackson, Colin
Parkin, B. T.
Zilliacus, K.


Jenkins, Hugh (Putney)
Pavitt, Laurence



Jenkins, Rt. Hn. Roy (Stechford)
Pearson, Sir Frank (Clitheroe)
TELLERS FOR THE AYES:


Johnson, James (K'ston-on-Hull, W.)
Pentland, Norman
Mr. Richard Crawshaw and


Johnson Smith, G. (East Grinstead)
Perry, Ernest G.
Mr. S. C. Silkin.




NOES


Allason, James (Hemel Hempstead)
Grant-Ferris, R.
Pitt, Dame Edith


Anstruther-Gray, Rt. Hn. Sir W.
Hall-Davis, A. G. F.
Redmayne, Rt. Hn. Sir Martin


Atkins, Humphrey
Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N. W.)
Rees-Davies, W. R.


Baker, W. H. K.
Harris, Reader (Heston)
Ridley, Hn. Nicholas


Batsford, Brian
Harvey, Sir Arthur Vere (Macclesf'd)
Roberts, Sir Peter (Heeley)


Bessell, Peter
Hogg, Rt. Hn. Quintin
Steel, David (Roxburgh)


Box, Donald
Hornsby-Smith, Rt. Hn. Dame P.
Stodart, Anthony


Braine, Bernard
Howard, Hn. G. R. (St. Ives)
Studholme, Sir Henry


Bromley-Davenport, Lt.-Col. Sir Walter
Hutchison, Michael Clark
Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)


Clark, William (Nottingham, S.)
Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)
Taylor, Edward M. (G'gow, Cathcart)


Clarke, Brig. Terence (Portsmth, W.)
Johnston, Russell (Inverness)
Temple, John M.


Crowder, F. P.
Kilfedder, James A.
Thompson, Sir Richard (Croydon, S.)


Cunningham, Sir Knox
Kimball, Marcus
Turton, Rt. Hn. R. H.


Dance, James
King, Evelyn (Dorset, S.)
van Straubenzee, W. R.


Davies, Dr. Wyndham (Perry Barr)
Lagden, Godfrey
Wall, Patrick


Dodds-Parker, Douglas
Longden, Gilbert
Weatherill, Bernard


Drayson, C. B.
McAdden, Sir Stephen
Wise, A. R.


Eden, Sir John
Maydon, Lt.-Cmdr. S. L. C.
Woodhouse, Hn. Christopher


Elliot, Capt. Walter (Carshalton)
Mitchell, David
Woodnutt, Mark


Farr, John
Monro, Hector
Wylie, N. R.


Gardner, Edward
Murton, Oscar
Yates, William (The Wrekin)


Gibson-Watt, David
Noble, Flt. Hn. Michael



Gilmour, Sir John (East Fife)
Onslow, Cranley
TELLERS FOR THE NOES:


Glover, Sir Douglas
Page, John (Harrow, W.)
Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop and


Glyn, Sir Richard
Page, R. Graham (Crosby)
Mr. Ray Mawby.


Goodhew, Victor
Pickthorn, Rt. Hn. Sir Kenneth

Question put accordingly:—

Division No. 256.]
AYES
[12.26 a.m.


Abse, Leo
Hamling, William (Woolwich, W.)
Orbach, Maurice


Albu, Austen
Hannan, William
Orme, Stanley


Alison, Michael (Barkston Ash)
Harper, Joseph
Oswald, Thomas


Alldritt, Walter
Harrison, Walter (Wakefield)
Page, Derek (King's Lynn)


Allen, Scholefield (Crewe)
Hart, Mrs. Judith
Paget, R. T.


Atkinson, Norman
Hattersley, Roy
Palmer, Arthur


Awdry, Daniel
Hazell, Bert
Parker, John


Bacon, Miss Alice
Heffer, Eric S.
Parkin, B. T.


Bagier, Gordon A. T.
Higgins, Terence L.
Pavitt, Laurence


Bell, Ronald
Hobden, Dennis (Brighton, K'town)
Pentland, Norman


Bence, Cyril
Hooson, H. E.
Perry, Ernest C.


Benn, Rt. Hn. Anthony Wedgwood
Hornby, Richard
Pike, Miss Mervyn


Bessell, Peter
Houghton, Rt. Hn. Douglas
Powell, Rt. Hn. J. Enoch


Binns, John
Howarth, Harry (Wellingborough)
Probert, Arthur


Bishop, E. S.
Howe, Geoffrey (Bebington)
Randall, Harry


Blackburn, F.
Howell, Denis (Small Heath)
Rees, Merlyn


Blenkinsop, Arthur
Howie, W.
Reynolds, G. W.


Bowden, Rt. Hn. H. W. (Leics, S. W.)
Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)
Richard, Ivor


Bowen, Roderic (Cardigan)
Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)
Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)


Boyle, Rt. Hn. Sir Edward
Hunter, Adam (Dunfermline)
Robinson, Rt. Hn. K. (St. Pancras, N.)


Braddock, Mrs. E. M.
Irving, Sydney (Dartford)
Rodgers, William (Stockton)


Bray, Dr. Jeremy
Jackson, Cohn
Rogers, George (Kensington, N.)


Brooke, Rt. Hn. Henry
Jenkins, Hugh (Putney)
Ross, Rt. Hn. William


Brown, Hugh D. (Glasgow, Provan)
Jenkins, Rt. Hn. Roy (Stechford)
St. John-Stevas, Norman


Brown, R. W. (Shoreditch &amp; Fbury)
Johnson, James (K'ston-on-Hull, W.)
Shore, Peter (Stepney)


Buchan, Norman (Renfrewshire, W.)
Johnson Smith, G. (East Grinstead)
Short, Rt. Hn. E. (N'c'tle-on-Tyne, C.)


Carlisle, Mark
Johnston, Russell (Inverness)
Short, Mrs. Renée (W'hampton, N. E.)


Carmichael, Neil
Jones, Dan (Burnley)
Silkin, John (Deptford)


Castle, Rt. Hn. Barbara
Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)
Silverman, Julius (Aston)


Chataway, Christopher
Jones, T. W. (Merioneth)
Silverman, Sydney (Nelson)


Coleman, Donald
Joseph, Rt. Hn. Sir Keith
Skeffington, Arthur


Conlan, Bernard
Kenyon, Clifford
Slater, Mrs. Harriet (Stoke, N.)


Crossman, Rt. Hn. R. H. S.
Kerr, Mrs. Anne (R'ter &amp; Chatham)
Slater, Joseph (sengefield)


Cullen, Mrs. Alice
Kerr, Dr. David (W'worth, Central)
Small, William


Dalyell, Tam
Lawson, George
Snow, Julian


Davies, G. Elfed (Rhondda, E.)
Lewis, Arthur (West Ham, N.)
Soskice, Rt. Hn. Sir Frank


Davies, Ifor (Gower)
Loughlin, Charles
Stainton, Keith


Davies, S. O. (Merthyr)
Lubbock, Eric
Steel, David (Roxburgh)


de Freitas, Sir Geoffrey
McBride, Neil
Swain, Thomas


Delargy, Hugh
MacColl, James
Swingler, Stephen


Dell, Edmund
MacDermot, Niall
Taverne, Dick


Diamond, Rt. Hn. John
McInnes, James
Thomas, Sir Leslie (Canterbury)


Dodds, Norman
Mackie, George Y. (C'ness &amp; S'land)
Thomas, Rt. Hn. Peter (Conway)


Driberg, Tom
Mackie, John (Enfield, E.)
Thornton, Ernest


Duffy, Dr. A. E. P.
Mahon, Peter (Preston, S.)
Thorpe, Jeremy


Dunn, James A.
Mahon, Simon (Bootle)
Tinn, James


English, Michael
Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfield, E.)
Tuck, Raphael


Ennals, David
Manuel, Archie
Urwin, T. W.


Ensor, David
Maude, Angus
Varley, Eric G.


Evans, Ioan (Birmingham, Yardley)
Maxwell, Robert
Vickers, Dame Joan


Fernyhough, E.
Mendelson, J. J.
Walden, Brian (All Saints)


Finch, Harold (Bedwellty)
Mikardo, Ian
Walker, Harold (Doncaster)


Fitch, Alan (Wigan)
Millan, Bruce
Wallace, George


Fletcher, Ted (Darlington)
Miller, Dr. M. S.
Watkins, Tudor


Floud, Bernard
Milne, Edward (Blyth)
Wells, William (Walsall, N.)


Foley, Maurice
Molloy, William
White, Mrs. Eirene


Foot, Sir Dingle (Ipswich)
Morris, Alfred (Wythenshawe)
Whitlock, William


Foot, Michael (Ebbw Vale)
Mulley, Rt. Hn. Frederick (Sheffield Pk)
Wilkins, W. A.


Ford, Ben
Munro-Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh
Willey, Rt. Hn. Frederick


Fraser, Rt. Hn. Hugh (St'fford &amp; Stone)
Murray, Albert
Williams, Clifford (Abertillery)


Fraser, Rt. Hn. Tom (Hamilton)
Newens, Stan
Williams, Mrs. Shirley (Hitchin)


Ginsburg, David
Noel-Baker, Francis (Swindon)
Willis, George (Edinburgh, E.)


Gresham Cooke, R.
Noel-Baker, Rt. Hn. Philip (Derby, S.)
Wilson, William (Coventry, S.)


Grey, Charles
Norwood, Christopher
Zilliacus, K.


Griffiths, Rt. Hn. James (Llanelly)
Oakes, Gordon



Griffiths, Will (M'chester, Exchange)
Ogden, Eric
TELLERS FOR THE AYES:


Hale, Leslie
O'Malley, Brian
Mr. Richard Crawshaw and


Hamilton, James (Bothwell)
Oram, Albert E. (E. Ham, S.)
Mr. S. C. Silkin.




NOES


Allason, James (Hemel Hempstead)
Clark, William (Nottingham, S.)
Davies, Dr. Wyndham (Perry Barr)


Anstruther-Gray, Rt. Hn. Sir W.
Clarke, Brig. Terence (Portsmth, W.)
Dean, Paul


Baker, W. H. K.
Cooke, Robert
Deedes, Rt. Hn. W. F.


Batsford, Brian
Cooper-Key, Sir Neill
Dodds-Parker, Douglas


Box, Donald
Corfield, F. V.
Drayson, G. B.


Braine, Bernard
Crowder, F. P.
Eden, Sir John


Bromley-Davenport, Lt.-Col. Sir Walter
Cunningham, Sir Knox
Elliot, Capt. Walter (Carshalton)


Cary, Sir Robert
Dance, James
Farr, John

The House divided: Ayes 200, Noes 98.

Fletcher-Cooke, Sir John (S'pton)
King, Evelyn (Dorset, S.)
Ridley, Hn. Nicholas


Fraser, Ian (Plymouth, Sutton)
Lagden, Godfrey
Roberts, Sir Peter (Heeley)


Gammans, Lady
Longden, Gilbert
Roots, William


Gardner, Edward
McAdden, Sir Stephen
Sharples, Richard


Gibson-Watt, David
MacArthur, Ian
Sinclair, Sir George


Giles, Rear-Admiral Morgan
Mawby, Ray
Stodart, Anthony


Gilmour, Sir John (East Fife)
Maxwell-Hyslop, R. J.
Studholme, Sir Henry


Glover, Sir Douglas
Maydon, Lt.-Cmdr. S. L. C.
Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)


Glyn, Sir Richard
Mills, Peter (Torrington)
Taylor, Edward M. (G'gow, Cathcart)


Goodhew, Victor
Mitchell, David
Teeling, Sir William


Grant-Ferris, R.
Monro, Hector
Temple, John M.


Grieve, Percy
More, Jasper
Turton, Rt. Hn. R. H.


Griffiths, Peter (Smethwick)
Mott-Radclyffe, Sir Charles
van Straubenzee, W. R.


Hall-Davis, A. G. F.
Murton, Oscar
Wall, Patrick


Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N. W.)
Noble, Rt. Hn. Michael
Ward, Dame Irene


Harris, Reader (Heston)
Onslow, Cranley
Weatherill, Bernard


Harvey, Sir Arthur Vere (Macclesf'd)
Page, John (Harrow, W.)
Whitelaw, William


Hill, J. E. B. (S. Norfolk)
Page, R. Graham (Crosby)
Williams, Sir Rolf Dudley (Exeter)


Hobson, Rt. Hn. Sir John
Pearson, Sir Frank (Clitheroe)
Wise, A. R.


Hogg, Rt. Hn. Quintin
Percival, Ian
Wood, Rt. Hn. Richard


Hordern, Peter
Pickthorn, Rt. Hn. Sir Kenneth
Woodnutt, Mark


Hornsby-Smith, Rt. Hn. Dame P.
Pitt, Dame Edith
Wylie, N. R.


Howard, Hn. G. R. (St. Ives)
Ramsden, Rt. Hn. James



Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)
Rawlinson, Rt. Hn. Sir Peter
TELLERS FOR THE NOES:


Kilfedder, James A.
Redmayne, Rt. Hn. Sir Martin
Sir Richard Thompson and


Kimball, Marcus
Rees-Davies, W. R.
Mr. Humphrey Atkins.

Bill accordingly read the Third time, and passed.

PROCEDURE

Mr. Peter Bessell discharged from the Select Committee; Mr. David Steel added.—[Mr. Fitch.]

ADJOURNMENT

Resolved, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Fitch.]

Adjourned accordingly at twenty-four minutes to One o'clock.